Life for the Inuit, the natives of Canada’s Arctic, has never been easy. They have built up their lives in a frozen part of the world where permafrost keeps most life from growing from under the earth.

Things didn’t get any better when they made contact with the outside world. From the moment they first met the Europeans, the Inuit have gone through tragedy after tragedy. They have been taken from their homes. Their culture has been crushed, and countless lives have been ruined—all in ways that still affect them today.

10 First Contact With Europeans Ended In A Kidnapping

Martin Frobisher was one of the first European faces the Inuit saw. Frobisher met and talked with the Inuit—and then kidnapped three of them.

Frobisher dragged a man, his wife, and their infant child into his boat and brought them back to England to show them off. There, they displayed their talents, demonstrating how they made kayaks and hunted animals.

The European didn’t think highly of the Inuit. “They were savage people and fed only upon raw flesh,” one man wrote. His entry abruptly ends: “They died here within a month.”

Unprepared for European diseases, the Inuit man fell ill and died nearly as soon as he arrived. His wife died the next week and their baby shortly after. The family was buried with only a short obituary left behind. “Burials in Anno 1577,” it read. “Collichang, a heathen man, buried the 8th of November. Egnock, a heathen woman, buried the 13th of November.”

9 They Were Put In Human Zoos

By the 1800s, Europeans had started gathering up all the exotic people they’d met in the New World and showing them off in human zoos. Some were kidnapped, and others were lured into it—but none of it went well.

A man named Johan Adrian Jacobsen lured a group of eight Inuit, who started performing in European zoos on October 15, 1880. They didn’t last long. The first, a boy named Nuggasak, got sick and died within two months.

The troupe went on, but 13 days later, Nuggasak’s mother died. “The husband is very sad,” Jacobsen wrote in his diary, “and expressed his wish to be able to accompany his wife.” Jacobsen denied his request. The show went on.

Two days later, the man’s daughter died. The heartbroken father fought with Jacobsen to stay with his dying girl, but Jacobsen didn’t let him. They had to go to Paris. When they reached France, though, the last five Inuit were sick and had to be rushed to the hospital. By January 8, all five had died.

“Everything went so well in beginning,” Jacobsen wrote as he watched the last of the Inuit die. He briefly mused over accepting the tiniest hint of responsibility: “Should I be indirectly responsible for their deaths?”

8 An Entire Tribe Was Wiped Out

At the turn of the 20th century, European whalers met a new tribe. They were called the Sadlermiut and lived on three islands in Hudson Bay.

The Sadlermiut lived in complete isolation from the Inuit. They didn’t build igloos. Instead, they lived in stone houses. They had their own religion and their own language. They appeared to have been influenced by Inuit culture, but they were their own people with their own beliefs and their own lifestyle.

Then, within a couple of years, the entire population was wiped out. European diseases spread among them quickly. By 1903, every single one of them had died.

7 The Canadian Government Gave The Inuit Numbers For Names

The first missionaries to the North couldn’t pronounce the Inuit’s names, and they weren’t particularly interested in learning. Instead, the missionaries gave the Inuit new names taken from the Bible, like “Noah” and “Jonah.”

The Inuit soon lost their family names, too. The Canadian government labeled each Inuit with an Eskimo Identification number that doubled as their last name. Their numbers were used as their last names on all government documents. The Inuit were also forced to wear their numbers around their necks like dog tags.

By the 1940s, the Inuit went by names like Annie E7-121. They kept those names until disturbingly recently. The Inuit people weren’t officially allowed to use their own names (instead of numbers) until 1978.

6 People Were Forcibly Moved Farther North

In the 1950s, the Canadian government decided that it was time to tackle “The Eskimo Problem.” They told the Inuit that the government wanted to improve their lives by taking them to a new home with better game to hunt and fish to catch. It was supposed to be an easier life.

Instead, the government relocated the Inuit to places like Grise Fiord and Resolute Bay, where the temperature on a winter night drops to -40 degrees Celsius (-40 °F) and the darkness of night lasts for five months straight. For the first year, people had to live there in tents without enough food or other supplies.

Hunting was also much harder there. Most Inuit wanted to go home immediately, but they weren’t permitted to return to their homes for another 35 years. As it turned out, the government didn’t want to help the Inuit. The Canadian government just wanted the people living in the North to cement their claim to the Arctic against the USSR.

The Inuit were moved north for “the strategic interests of Canada’s great neighbor to the south.” That’s not a conspiracy theory; that’s a quote from a government document.

5 The RCMP Slaughtered Sled Dogs

Before the 1950s, many of the Inuit still lived off the land. When the government tackled the “Eskimo Problem,” though, that changed. Every Inuit they could find was moved into new government-created settlements.

The government promised the Inuit that this would lead to a new flood of wealth into their territory, but it didn’t really pan out that way. Instead, the Inuit lived in abject poverty in these settlements.

It was worse now, though, because the Inuit couldn’t sustain themselves by hunting as they had before. Now they had to follow Canadian government laws that limited how much the Inuit could catch. These laws weren’t intended for people who lived off the land.

Many Inuit kept hunting anyway—until the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) slaughtered their sled dogs. Claiming that these dogs were dangerous, the RCMP killed them by the thousands. Without sled dogs, it was impossible for the Inuit to hunt the way they had before. They were left to rely on their work as laborers.

“I never understood why they were shot,” an Inuit man named Thomas Kublu later related. “I thought, was it because my hunting was getting in the way of my time as a laborer?”

4 Children Were Separated From Their Parents

Once in the settlements, the children were sent to schools. Most of these towns, though, didn’t have schools of their own yet. So the kids were taken from their parents and sent to other provinces.

Many parents believed that they would lose any financial support from the government if they didn’t send their kids off. These families were newly impoverished and unable to hunt as they had before, and so the parents let their kids go.

In their new schools, the children were forced to speak English. Some have related that they were beaten if they spoke their own language, Inuktitut. They were taught a curriculum based on Southern values and languages.

By the time they were sent back to their parents, they barely remembered their own culture. “I thought I was a Southerner,” one man related. “I didn’t want to come back. I didn’t like the tundra and the house.”

3 Children Were Abused

The children were sent to residential schools that were horrible. This is seen as one of the low marks in Canadian history, and it really was. At least 3,200 natives died in these schools, many from abuse and neglect.

They were physically abused. If they spoke Inuktitut, one student recalled, they “had to put their hands on the desk and got 20 slaps.” If they didn’t stand during the nation anthem, they were beaten.

Worse still, they were sexually abused. According to one student, a group of Catholic priests at one school made students “touch their penis for candy.” Another has said that she “was thrown into a cold shower every night, sometimes after being raped.”

People reported the sexual abuse, but an active government campaign worked to block all investigations. Their staff was mostly volunteers, missionaries who were barely paid a dime. They were hard to replace—and so the government turned a blind eye to the abuse.

2 Substance Abuse

The Indian Act made it illegal for the Inuit to buy alcohol. In 1959, though, immediately after pulling the Inuit out of the lives they knew, the government decided to make an exception and let them drink.

It wasn’t the best time to do it. The Inuit were going through an incredibly hard time and adjusting to a new sort of life. They didn’t quite know what to do with themselves in their homes and with their new lifestyles. They spent most of their time bored. So when liquor was introduced, they drank it.

“Back then, the whole town would be drunk for a whole week,” one man recalled. “Everyone was hurting inside, not living as they should. People growing up with a lot of pain. I don’t want my grandchildren to grow up with that kind of pain and end up like us.”

1 The New Cost Of Living Is Unbelievably Expensive

Since then, things have improved. The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement has given the Inuit some autonomy, and the Canadian government has issued apologies for the past. Life in the North, however, is still far from ideal. The Inuit territory of Nunavut is the poorest in the country, and 60 percent of the people there can’t afford to feed their families.

The average Inuit makes one-third the wage of the average Canadian, and the Inuit cost of living is significantly higher. Much of the Arctic is covered in permafrost, meaning that most food has to be imported from the South. That leads to some incredibly high prices.

The people of Nunavut started taking pictures of the prices at their grocery stores, and they’re absurd. A cabbage can cost $28.54. A slice of watermelon goes for $13.09, 18 pieces of fried chicken fetch $61.99, and a 24-pack of bottled water goes for $104.99.

Worse, though, is the lingering impact of everything that’s happened. Among the Inuit, the suicide rate for teenage boys is 40 times higher than it is in the rest of the country—a symptom of a culture that has been systematically destroyed.

[WARNING: some video footage on this list is of an adult nature and may contain shocking or sexual images.] Despite being lusted over by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, pornography has always been held at arms length compared to other forms of popular entertainment. This is certainly due to the fact that pornography contains graphic and sexual imagery that goes against many religious and cultural norms. While porn has become more socially acceptable and even mainstream, there have been several controversies relating to the industry, the actors in it, and people who view porn. Here are the most significant ten.

10 Terrorist Death Threats

Religious symbols and their use have always been a source of controversy, even outside the porn world. In 2015 however a new shock began after Lebanese born porn-star Mia Khalifa appeared in a scene wearing a hijab, a garment used by Muslim women to signal modesty. Upon release, this scene garnered the attention of the Islamic State, who in turn called for the murder of Khalifa, even going so far as to post a photo of her home to their twitter page and creating a fake video of her being prepared for execution.^[1]

These threats, as well as the group’s hacking of Khalifa’s instagram page led to her leaving the porn industry after only a few brief months. In 2018 Khalifa revealed in an interview that she left the porn industry due to these threats and regretted her work there. Mia’s is not the only nasty story like this. For other horrifying tales from deep in the bowels of social media, take a look at 9 Sinister Facts About The Dark Side Of Instagram.

9 Addiction

Society recognises and accepts the damages caused by things such as alcohol and drug addiction, however equally damaging things such as pronography addiction are simply brushed off. This is despite numerous studies that have proven the dangers of regular porn use. Such effects include erectile dysfunction, social isolation, and relationship dysfunction.^[2]

Porn addiction was brought to the forefront of public attention briefly in 2016 when noted actor Terry Crews revealed that he had been struggling with it for years, even needing to attend rehab in order to fully quit and save his marriage. Sadly, there has been no other mainstream recognition of this issue since. And with 40 million Americans using porn every day, and pornhub.com receiving an average of 120 million visits a day, this is a problem that is growing hugely. You can learn more about this controversial industry on Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Pornography.

8 Mercedes Carrera Child Abuse Scandal

On February 1 2019 police raided the home of pornstar Mercedes Carrera and her husband Jason Whitney leading to the pair later facing several criminal charges. The most damning of the charges are those in relation to the alleged sexual abuse of Carrera’s young daughter from a previous relationship. The girl reported the alleged abuse to her father who in turn reported it to the police. Searching the couples’ home, police found that their bedroom had been outfitted to record pornographic videos, as well as digital evidence which they say proves abuse. In total, the couple were charged with inappropriate touching, oral copulation, digital penetration, in addition to several charges relating to gun and drug possession which were later dropped.^[3]

Their trial was scheduled to begin February 6 2020 however due to scheduling issues with lawyers as well as the coronavirus, it has been put on hold until further notice. If the pair are found guilty, it will represent an example of sexual abuse that porn critics claim is rampant in the industry, as evidenced by the Top 10 Terrible Cases Of Kidnapping And Abuse.

7 The Suicide of August Ames

On December 2 2017, Canadian born pornographic actress, August Ames, tweeted a warning that a performer on a set she had previously worked on had been involved in gay pornography. She implied that it was unprofessional to let him work with female performers. The tweet became a lightning rod of controversy, with many in the industry accusing Ames of hating gays. Ames doubled down, saying she had the right to feel safe in her job and should have the choice to work with whomever she pleased, but the threats, accusations and criticism of her kept coming.^[4]

The next day, December 4th 2017, Ames sent out a final tweet, simply reading, “fuck y’all.” Her body was found a day later: she had committed suicide by hanging. This tragedy sparked an international debate around bullying, insanity in the porn industry, and people’s opinions on homosexuality. Perhaps some of the ire targeting Ames would have been better served focussing on the countries listed on our Top 10 Countries That Completely Hate Gay People.

6 Bradford Thomas Wagner

Between 1993 and 1998, the women of Boulder Colorado lived in fear of the Tantra Rapist, an assailant who is known to have sexually assaulted at least 4 women. In June 2004, police arrested 36 year old real-estate agent Bradford Thomas Wagner for allegedly committing 5 rapes between 1993 and 1998. Although on the surface, Wagner may have appeared to be an average white collar worker, he had a checkered past.^[5]

In the early 1990s, coinciding with some of the alleged rapes, Wagner had starred in twenty gay porn films under the name “Tim Barnett”. Authorities in California also considered Wagner a suspect in 14 other rapes committed prior to his time in Colorado. Before he could be brought to trial however, Wagner hanged himself in his cell using a bed sheet, dying on July 13 2005 at the age of 37, taking the truth of whatever happened with him. Wagner is, of course, not the most recent case of someone prominent being found hanged in prison . . . 10 Facts That Will Make You Believe Jeffrey Epstein Was Murdered.

5 Child Pornography

Most of us probably think that child pornogrpahy is confined to the dark web, where only the most depraved members of society venture. The truth however, is that child pornography is avalible on nearly every mainstream porn site in the world, with not enough being done to take it down. In 2020 alone, Pornhub, the most popular online streaming service, was found to have hosted videos of a kidnapped 15 year old being sexually assaulted. The CEO of the company Girls Do Porn was charged with luring women under false pretenses to appear in videos and footage depicting children being sexually abused were being routinely uploaded to the site.^[6]

These controversies led to condemnation across the political spectrum, as well as protests outside of Pornhub’s Montreal headquarters in March of 2020. Protesters demanded that company executives be held fully responsible and the website be shut down due to the many laws broken. Pornhub has not responded to the demands and continues to operate as normal, with those critical of the site pursuing legal action in order to shut down what they believe to be a website aiding in human trafficking. For a deeper look at pornography as a product of modern slavery and human trafficking, you should look at 10 Everyday Products That Are Made With Slave Labor.

4 Pornstar Dismembers Man to Live Out a Movie

In one of Canada’s most shocking crimes, former gay pornstar, stripper, and wannabe movie star, Luca Magnotta, stabbed and dismembered a Chinese exchange student, Jun Lin, after meeting Lin on a gay dating app. Upon dismembering him, Magnotta sent Lin’s body parts to a series of public schools, and the offices of various Canadian Political Parties, including the governing Conservative Party. Soon after this he went on the run, triggering an international manhunt. He was eventually caught in an Internet cafe in Germany reading articles about himself.^[7]

At trial, it was revealed that Magnotta had spent most of his adult life trying to achieve fame, whether it be through his work as a pornstar, his claim that the media was writing false stories about him being engaged to Karla Holmolka, and that members of Toronto’s Greek community were out to get him. Today, while Magnotta is serving a sentence of life in prison with no possiblity of parole for 25 years his videos remain on pornhub, where he is likely garnering the fame and attention he wanted from his porn career. For those preferring to read more on the murderous side of Magnotta’s story, check out Top 10 Gruesome Crimes Fit For Horror Movies.

3 Serial Killer Pornography

Several serial killers such as Ted Bundy have cited pornography as something that led them to kill, however not many serial killers go so far as to appear in pornography outright. There are always exceptions however. American Serial Killer, Leonard Lake, spent much of his childhood taking naked photos of his sisters, often with the encouragement of their grandmother. This sparked Lake’s interest in pornography, one that followed him for the rest of his life. This is evidenced by his adult activities, where he made, produced, distributed, and starred in various amatur porn movies, usually featuring bondage and sadomasochism.^[8]

Some of these themes echoed Lake’s crimes in which women were imprisoned in a bunker on Lake’s land and repededly sexually assulted before being murdered by Lake and his accomplice, Charles Ng. Today very few copies of Lake’s pornographic films exist, however snippets have been used in documentaries about the murderous pair, often to highlight Lake’s depraved sexual appetite. If you have the stomach for it, Lake and Ng can be seen on our list of 10 Videos Of Violence And Insanity.

2 Incest

Incest is rightly condemed in every developed nation around the globe, and can lead to mental instability, drug abuse, and suicide in its participants. That hasn’t stopped the porn industry however. The step-fantasy has been a long running theme in the porn industry, however it was strictly fantasy, until recently at least. Now many porn studios are recruiting blood relatives to appear in scenes and photoshoots together. In January 2020, a mother and daughter went viral on twitter after they announced they were creating an OnlyFans account, complete with the pair posing in lingerie. This is only one of many similar cases of family members appearing in pornographic videos together.^[9]

Fraternal twin sisters going by the names Joey and Sami White have appeared in numerous scenes together, as well as Polish sisters going by the names Natalia and Natasha Starr. Some scenes have bypassed regulations due to the fact the girls have not touched each other, however that is not always the case. There have been scenes filmed and distributed across mainstream pornography websites depicting actual blood relatives having sexual relationships. One notable example would be real life half sisters Katya and Veronica Rodriguez having sex with each other and posting the video to pornhub where it remains to this day. Incestuous prostitution was a big feature in the Weimar Republic as it began its final decline. You can read more about that on 10 Indications That Western Society Is Collapsing.

1 The Wonderland Murders

John Holmes is considered to be the first mainstream male pornstar. He also stood accused of murdering four people and attempting to kill a fifth in what is known as The Wonderland Murders. The events surrounding the murders are obscure, however what is known is that on the night of June 31 1981, 4 members of the Wonderland Gang were killed, with a fifth member found badly injured but still alive. A palmprint of John Holmes was found at the scene leading to his questioning by police. No further evidence could be obtained from Holmes, who upon leaving the police station, went on the run, but was eventually arrested and charged with all 4 murders in Florida 5 months later.^[10]

Holmes pleaded Not Guilty” and after a three week trial was acquitted of all charges except one count of contempt of court, for which he served 5 months in jail. He made a brief return to porn after his release, but soon after he was diagnosed as HIV positive, causing him to retire from the industry permanently. Even on Holmes’ deathbed police were still trying to gain information on what had happened that night, however the HIV had rendered him unable to answer. If you want more information on John Holmes, he was featured prominently on our list of Top 10 Most Famous Adult Film Stars.

We like to imagine that we learn from our tragedies—that when the worst moment comes, people change their ways and start working together to make things right.

But sometimes, even after the catastrophe is over, the tragedy continues. People get swept up in the havoc and chaos of the moment and do things that make history’s worst moments even worse. And in the aftermath, some of our darkest moments are left with details too bleak to make it into the history books.

10 Tiananmen Massacre
China Billed The Victims For The Bullets

In 1989, after the death of the controversial figure Hu Yaobang, Chinese students marched out to Tiananmen Square and tried to force real change in China. They made a list of demands and led a hunger strike, hoping to bring an end to corruption and forge the first steps toward democracy.

All that came to an end, though, when the army marched in. Soldiers and tanks advanced on Tiananmen Square, right in the heart of Beijing. At least 300 people were gunned down by their own government, with some estimates putting that number as high as 2,700.

Usually, the story ends there—but there’s an extra little detail that makes it that much worse. After the massacre, some sources reported that the government billed the victims’ families for the cost of the bullets. The families of the protesters were charged the equivalent of 27 cents for each bullet used to kill their children.

The Chinese government has never admitted to it. But we know for a fact that they charged other dissidents for the bullets that killed them. There’s a lot of reason to believe that the reports are true that the government did it here, too.

9 My Lai Massacre
Nixon Pardoned The Man Responsible

The worst incident in the Vietnam War was the My Lai Massacre. In 1968, American soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians in South Vietnam. They gang-raped women, mutilated children—and met absolutely no consequences.

Of everyone involved, only one soldier was actually charged: William Calley. The courts found Calley guilty of killing 22 innocent people and sentenced him to life in prison.

He never actually served the time, though. Instead, they just put him on house arrest, and he didn’t do that for very long. Calley hung around at home for three years and then got a full presidential pardon from Richard Nixon.

That doesn’t mean that everyone got off easy. One person suffered: Hugh Thompson. He was the man who reported the massacre and testified against the people who did it.

Thompson risked his life trying to save as many Vietnamese people as he could from his own men. He was rewarded for his bravery and heroism with death threats. People left mutilated animals on his porch each morning, and he suffered PTSD for the rest of his life.

8 Pompeii
A Nearby Town Got So Hot That People’s Heads Exploded

The destruction of Pompeii is one of the most infamous natural disasters in history. An entire city was leveled under a sea of volcanic ash that killed thousands.

Compared to the people in Herculaneum, though, Pompeii got off easy. After the volcano erupted in AD 79, a witness described the scene: “A fearful black cloud, bent by forked and quivering bursts of flames, . . . sank down to the earth and covered the sea.”

That black cloud hit Herculaneum and covered the whole city. It was incredibly hot—over 500 degrees Celsius (932 °F). It burned the tops of buildings off completely and then touched on the people below. At such incredible temperatures, their teeth cracked, their skin burned off, and their bones turned black. Then their heads literally exploded.

7 9/11
Fallout Led To More Cancer And Car Crashes

On September 11, 2001, when the planes flew into the twin towers in New York City, 2,996 innocent lives were brought to an end. It was a horrible moment and the worst terrorist attack on US soil. Over the next few years, though, that death toll would become even higher.

People were so afraid of flying after 9/11 that airline use went down by 20 percent. As a result, a lot more people were going greater distances in cars instead—which is a lot more dangerous. In the 12 months following the attacks, an estimated 1,595 more Americans died in car accidents because they were afraid to fly on planes.

Worse, though, was the increase in cancer. The twin towers were built with 400 tons of asbestos, which spread through the city when the towers collapsed. That cloud of asbestos affected an estimated 410,000 people, and cancer in New York City has spiked because of it.

The responders suffered the worst. About 70 percent of the recovery personnel who helped on that day now suffer from lung problems. Approximately 1,400 responders died in the 10 years after the tragedy. Another 1,140 responders have developed cancer since that tragic day.

6 The Irish Potato Famine
Queen Victoria Forbade People From Donating Too Much

When the people of Ireland started to starve from the Irish Potato Famine, Abdul Medjid Khan, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, wanted to help. In 1847, he prepared ships full of food and offered to send Ireland £10,000 to help them through the crisis.

British diplomats, though, ordered him not to. British royal protocol, they explained, said that no one should contribute more than Queen Victoria herself. At their order, the sultan reduced his donation to only £1,000 instead.

The Irish were thrilled with his donation anyway. They called the donation an “act of regal munificence” and said, “For the first time, a Mohammedan sovereign, representing multitudinous Islam populations, manifests spontaneously a warm sympathy with a Christian nation.”

The sultan, though, may have revealed a little regret at the compromise when he wrote back, “I would have done all in my power to relieve their wants.”

5 Black Death
The Plague Led To A Jewish Genocide

The Black Death wiped out between 75 and 200 million people in the mid-1300s. It killed an estimated one-third of the population of Europe. It was a terrible tragedy—and like most tragedies, Europe dealt with it by blaming the Jews.

Many Europeans believed that the plague was a Jewish conspiracy. According to the story, the Jews had gone around the country poisoning wells to make good Christian people suffer. At first, it was a conspiracy theory. Then the Inquisition rounded up Jewish people and tortured them until they agreed to say they’d done it. Then it was, in the eyes of the people, a full-blown fact.

Mobs rose up and dragged people out into the streets. Jewish babies were pulled from their parents. Whole communities of people were tied to stakes and burned alive. In one case, more than 2,000 people were incinerated at once.

The Black Death, of course, was not a Jewish conspiracy. It affected Jews and Gentiles alike. That didn’t save anyone, though. In the city of Strasbourg, it became law that no Jew should enter the city for 100 years.

4 Hurricane Katrina
A Neighboring Town Turned Away Refugees At Gunpoint

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, countless people lost their homes. In a desperate bid for survival, people fled to neighboring towns for safety. The police of New Orleans helped them, pointing the way to the bridge that led to the town of Gretna.

But instead of a welcoming party, these people found a barricade on the bridge. Four police cruisers blocked the lanes, and eight officers were waiting for the refugees with shotguns. They yelled, “We don’t want another Superdome!” and chased the people off. According to some reports, the officers even stole the refugees’ food and water before chasing them away.

Arthur Lawson, the Gretna chief of police, didn’t even deny it. He confirmed that he sealed off the bridge, saying, “There was no place for them to come on our side.”

3 Wounded Knee
20 Soldiers Were Given Medals Of Honor

In 1890, US troops attacked an innocent Lakota camp. Most of the people were unarmed, but the troops ran as many down as possible, slaughtering approximately 200 innocent men, women, and children. It was an outrage, and the men who did it were murderers. And for doing it, 20 of them were given Medals of Honor.

More people were given awards for the Wounded Knee Massacre than for most real battles. The government actually wanted to give out 25, but a man named General Miles fought it, calling it “an insult to the memory of the dead.” Even with his protests, they still handed out 20.

One man, Sergeant Toy, was cited “for bravery displayed while shooting hostile Indians.” In the full report, though, it was made clear that he shot Native Americans who were running away. Another man, Lieutenant Garlington, was awarded for blocking off the escape of fleeing victims. He forced them to hide a ravine, and Lieutenant Gresham was awarded for going into that ravine to kill the victims.

At least one Medal of Honor recipient seems to have felt the guilt of what he did. Two years later, Sergeant Loyd killed himself just a few days before the anniversary of the massacre. For his part at Wounded Knee, he had been given the Medal of Honor for “bravery.”

2 The Great Fire Of London
The Town Hanged A Mentally Handicapped Man

Robert Hubert was described as “not well in the mind” by everyone who knew him. He was very likely mentally handicapped or at least mentally ill. He could barely speak a word of English, and his limbs were constricted by palsy. But despite all that, he was hanged for firebombing London in 1666.

Hubert wasn’t actually in London when the fire happened. He showed up two days later and walked around repeating the word “Yes!” In 1666, that was enough evidence to a form a lynch mob, drag him off the streets, and pull him into the police station.

There, he was interrogated until he said “Yes!” that he’d been paid a shilling by a Frenchman to burn down London. He changed his story every time he told it, but they hanged him anyway.

Fifteen years later, the captain of the ship that took Hubert to London finally stepped forward and told everyone that Hubert wasn’t even in London during the Great Fire. By then, though, it was far too late.

1 The Titanic
They Billed The Families Of The Victims

The White Star Line was nothing if not frugal. Due to a clause worked into their contracts, every employee aboard the ship was fired the second that the Titanic began to sink. The company would not, after all, pay wages for employees who were wasting their time drowning.

Afterward, the families of the dead were informed that they would have to pay the freight cost if they wanted their loved ones’ bodies. Most couldn’t afford it, of course, and so today, many of those who died have memorials instead of graves.

Things were far worse for the musicians. The band who heroically played on while the ship sank were completely abandoned. They were registered as independent contractors, which meant that White Star Line legally didn’t have to do anything for them. The other crew members’ families got survivor benefits, but the families of the band didn’t get a penny.

That doesn’t mean they got nothing, though. The families of the band were sent one memento: a bill for the cost of the uniforms.

Everyone knows about the Titanic, the Astroworld crowd crush, and 9/11. But there are plenty of other deadly disasters that deserve to be remembered, too. Let’s take a look at a handful of these historical horrors. 

10. The Victoria Hall Disaster

Sunderland, England, June 16, 1883. What should’ve been a festive good time turned into a horrifying tragedy. The Victoria Hall, typically a place of joy and celebration, witnessed a horrifying incident during a children’s variety show, when a rush for prizes led to a deadly stampede. 

Organizers distributed toys and treats to the children in attendance without considering the need for crowd control – especially for excitable kids who would rather do anything than wait patiently in line or allow the staff to bring the goodies to them. In an unfortunate turn of events, panic ensued as children rushed to claim their prizes, and the surge towards the staircase led to a fatal crush. The narrow stairway became a bottleneck, and the situation spun rapidly out of control. The Victoria Hall disaster claimed the lives of 183 children out of nearly 2,000 in attendance, devastating the community. 

9. The Balvano Train Disaster

As if Italy wasn’t going through enough in March 1944, a tragic incident unfolded on the 2nd of that month near Salerno, Italy, that’s been shrouded in obscurity until recent revelations. Train Number 8017, originally a freight train, departed Salerno with a clandestine load of approximately 650 passengers, a mix of soldiers and civilians seeking transit through the Apennine Mountains. Battling wartime constraints, the train, laden with low-grade coal substitutes, faced an unexpected halt in the Galleria delle Armi tunnel near Balvano.

Whether stalled due to the strain of ascending the slope or awaiting a descending train, the 8017 idled in the tunnel for over 30 minutes. Unbeknownst to the occupants, the burning low-grade coal substitutes pumped carbon monoxide into the carriages, leading to a silent catastrophe. Tragically, more than 500 passengers asphyxiated in the confined space, marking one of the century’s most unusual and underreported rail disasters. The wartime government, immersed in intense military efforts, kept the details veiled, contributing to the incident’s historical obscurity despite its devastating toll. Sadly, it’s not like mass civilian deaths was out of the ordinary in the thick of the Second World War. 

8. The Great Smog of 1952 

You might be familiar with this one if you’ve seen The Crown. In December 1952, London found itself enveloped in a deadly, strange phenomenon that later became known as the Great Smog: a catastrophic air pollution event. A combination of cold weather, which led residents to burn more coal for heating, and an anticyclone that settled over the city, trapped pollutants in the dense fog, created the perfect conditions for an environmental disaster.

The thick, yellowish smog that blanketed London for five days resulted in reduced visibility, chaos in transportation, and a dramatic increase in respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses. The toxic air, packed with sulfur dioxide and particulate matter from coal combustion, led to an estimated 12,000 premature deaths over the next few years. The calamity prompted significant changes in environmental policy, with the introduction of the Clean Air Act in 1956, marking a pivotal moment in recognizing the importance of air quality regulation and the severe consequences of unchecked industrial pollution.

7. The 1905 Grover Shoe Factory Disaster

In 1905, a catastrophic explosion occurred at Brockton, Massachussett’s Grover Shoe Factory, leading to one of the deadliest industrial disasters in U.S. history. 

The blast was caused by a small but untreated crack in the metal of a boiler, that was hidden from inspectors by overlapping steel plates held together with rivets. It took time for the crack to get to a catastrophic point. But when it did, things fell apart quickly. The boiler blew to pieces, which caused a water tower to fall onto the roof, causing the top floor to collapse onto the one below, and that to smash onto the one below that, and on and on until the entire facility was smoke and debris. Fires engulfed what was left. Fortunately, many of the 300-400 workers who were inside at the time of the explosion made it out alive (although certainly rattled), but 58 died and more than 150 sustained injuries. Extensive measures were taken to recover the bodies, but given the limited technology of the day and the fact that they were dealing with mountains of smoldering rubble, they couldn’t get everyone – 18 victims were never found.  

6. The Haunted Castle Fire 

In May 1984, a fun day at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey, turned into a horror scene when a fire broke out in the Haunted Castle attraction, killing eight teenagers. The structure, composed of interconnected commercial trailers and plywood frames, became engulfed in flames, fueled by a foam pad inside the attraction. 

The Haunted Castle fire led to a lawsuit (although it eventually ended in a not guilty verdict), new ownership, an entirely revamped management team, and substantial investments in safety measures. The park, now operating as one of the safest family-entertainment facilities in the country, clearly underwent significant updates, including the installation of sprinkler systems, smoke and heat detectors, and emergency generators. The tragedy spurred a commitment to safety, with routine checks by the in-house fire brigade and collaboration with certified local fire inspectors to ensure compliance with state and national fire codes. 

5. The 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge Collapse

For more than six decades, the collapse of the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge is one of the most perplexing construction failures that ever dumbfounded engineers. Despite extensive studies, a unanimous agreement on the exact cause of the bridge’s failure has remained elusive. 

The primary explanation for the collapse revolves around “torsional flutter,” a complex mechanism involving several stages. The 1940 Narrows Bridge’s susceptibility to torsional forces, due to its large depth-to-width ratio, made it exceptionally flexible. A critical event occurred when the cable band at mid-span on the north cable slipped, leading to the separation of the cable into unequal segments and a shift from vertical to torsional movement. Contributing to the torsional motion was “vortex shedding,” a phenomenon where wind separation, swirling forces, and the bridge deck’s elastic response created a self-induced harmonic vibration pattern known as “torsional flutter.” Whatever the cause, it’s worth noting that other that there were no human fatalities involved in the incident.

4. The Iroquois Theatre Fire 

On a fateful winter day in Chicago on December 30, 1903, the Grand Iroquois Theater, only five weeks old, hosted a crowd of teachers, mothers, and kids as they watched a lavish musical comedy starring Eddie Foy. Little did the more than 1700 patrons know that the afternoon would turn into a catastrophic disaster. As the show hit its second act, a spark from a stage light ignited nearby drapery, setting off a fiery chain reaction. Efforts to contain the fire failed, and chaos ensued as terrified audience members, hindered by obscured exit doors and locked accordion gates, rushed towards the few available escape routes.

Amid the pandemonium, Eddie Foy, still in costume, tried to reassure the audience, while stagehands struggled with a malfunctioning fire-retardant curtain. The situation deteriorated as the fire spread uncontrollably. Cast members opened a rear stage door to flee, but the backdraft caused a fiery explosion, killing people in the balconies. Some lucky people found a makeshift escape via a precarious bridge, while hundreds were trapped inside, succumbing to the flames before firefighters could intervene. More than 275 people ultimately lost their lives. 

3. The 1958 Springhill Mining Disaster

Is there a worse place to get trapped than a dark mining shaft? On the evening of October 23, 1958, tragedy struck No. 2 mine in Springhill as an underground earthquake, akin to a coal mine bump, reverberated through the depths. The mine, believed to be the world’s deepest at 14,300 feet, had a history of small bumps, claiming ten lives since 1952. A fatal mistake in mining strategy exacerbated the risk; a shift from a step-like mining approach to one long wall, designed to alleviate pressure, resulted in a cataclysmic event. Floors, ceilings, and walls collided, creating chasms, blocking levels with coal and debris, and cutting off communication below 7800 feet.

In the aftermath, 81 men made their way to the surface, but that sadly didn’t account for everyone. Rescuers employed draegermen to breach sealed spaces and barefaced workers to excavate every corner. After six days, the grim reality set in as bodies were discovered. Miraculously, twelve men were found alive at the 13,000-foot level, followed by seven more three days later. The trapped miners had sustained hope through singing, praying, and banging on pipes. Ultimately, however, 75 lives were still lost, and No. 2 mine never reopened. 

2. The St. Francis Dam Failure

Nestled approximately forty miles northwest of Los Angeles, California, the curved concrete gravity St. Francis dam, erected between 1924 and 1926, played a pivotal role in the Los Angeles Aqueduct system. William Mulholland, a self-taught engineer celebrated for earlier triumphs, led the project, crafting a dam with a distinctive stepped downstream design and towering at 205 feet with a span of 700 feet.

The calamity struck in 1928 when the dam’s failure unfolded and caused one of the worst civil engineering disasters in US history. Over 400 lives were lost, and property damage soared to an estimated $7 million. Mulholland’s decisions, notably raising the dam’s height without adjusting its base width, exposed critical flaws in the structure’s design. Leaking cracks, disregarded in the lead-up to the disaster, further underscored the lack of due diligence. The tragedy’s root cause lay in a bunch of factors, including saturated conditions in the left abutment foundation rock, triggering a landslide, and destabilizing uplift forces. Mulholland, shouldering the blame, conceded, “If there was human error, I was the human,” resulting in the end of his esteemed career.

1. The Mina Stampede

On September 24, 2015, a tragic crowd crush unfolded during the annual Hajj pilgrimage in Mina, Mecca, Saudi Arabia, resulting in the deadliest Hajj disaster in history. Notably, the government of Saudi Arabia initially declared 769 deaths and 934 injuries, figures that remained official and unaltered despite subsequent revelations that bumped most estimates of the death toll to well north of 2,000. 

It all went down near the Jamaraat Bridge, sparking ongoing disputes about its cause. Saudi Ministry of Interior spokesman Mansour Al-Turki, addressing the matter in a press conference on the day of the disaster, stated that an investigation was underway, and the precise cause of the overcrowding leading to the fatal crush had yet to be determined. The aftermath of the Mina disaster ended up inflaming tensions between regional rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, already heightened by broader conflicts in the Middle East, including the Syrian Civil War and Yemeni Civil War.

School buses transport thousands of children every day. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), they are the safest vehicles on the road. This is due to the safety advancements school buses have undergone throughout decades of service and in response to several tragedies taking place. Collectively, these advancements have helped save lives and prevent accidents. Here is a list of 10 tragedies that resulted in safety advancements for school buses.

Related: Top 10 Deadliest Industrial Accidents That Were Avoidable

10 Railroad Crossings

Utah is known for many things, but a little-known fact about the state is that it happens to be the location of one of the worst transportation accidents in history. On the morning of December 1, 1938, a terrible blizzard swept through the Salt Lake Valley. Farrold Silcox was a school bus driver who had been driving for three years. He had 39 passengers after making all of his stops. On his way to Jordan High School in Sandy, there was a railroad crossing. Farrold stopped and looked both ways, then proceeded over the tracks.

As the bus was midway across the tracks, a freight train slammed into the bus, dragging it half a mile (0.8 kilometers) north before it was able to stop, killing 24 passengers and the driver. It was determined that the blizzard had hindered the bus driver’s ability to see the incoming train. Now, whenever a commercial vehicle is carrying passengers, the driver is required to stop and open the door and window in order to listen for an approaching train.^[1]

9 Manufacturing

School buses have evolved a lot since they were first introduced in the late 19th century. Every iteration of a school bus has been an improvement on the previous one in regard to safety. The next entry is the cause for one of these changes. On the morning of May 21, 1976, Evan Prothero drove a 1950 Crown with 53 passengers. After traveling for an hour, a buzzer began going off in the driver’s compartment, so he decided to exit the highway.

As he made his exit, he realized he was unable to lower his speed. The bus then hit a guardrail and went over its side, falling off the ramp and into a dirt field below. This caused the roof of the bus to collapse, resulting in 28 deaths and several injuries. The NTSB determined that the deaths were attributed to the construction of the bus itself. Regulations later required manufacturers to build sturdier buses that could withstand rollovers and other damage.^[2]

8 Emergency Exits

The following entry resulted in an enormous impact on school bus safety even though the bus was not actually on a school activity trip. On the evening of May 14, 1988, several children and their chaperones were returning from a trip to King’s Island. Over an hour into the trip home, the bus was hit head-on by a pickup driving northbound on the southbound lanes. The collision of the truck on the bus punctured the fuel tank, igniting the gasoline inside. This set the bus ablaze instantly.

The children scrambled to the rear, which was the only emergency exit. In total, 27 people lost their lives. When the authorities arrived at the scene, it was determined that the driver of the truck was intoxicated. He was charged and sentenced to prison for 16 years. Later, the state of Kentucky, as well as the country, passed legislation that called for more emergency exits on school buses, claiming if the bus had been better equipped, many more lives could have been saved.^[3]

7 Brake Training

Like the previous entry, the school bus in question was not on a school trip, but it was transporting several children at the time of its accident. On July 31, 1991, a 1989 Thomas school bus driven by Richard A. Gonzalez Jr. made its way down a steep mountain road. The bus began picking up speed, and he was unable to decelerate. As it continued descending the mountain, the driver started honking at the vehicle in front of him in an attempt to signal something was wrong.

The bus then veered into the opposite lane, passing the vehicle up. It then came to a bend in the road, but Richard was unable to negotiate the curve. The bus skidded, leaving the road at a high rate of speed, rolling down an embankment, and killing seven and injuring 53 others. The accident was largely attributed to the driver’s inability to properly operate the vehicle on a steep grade. In light of the accident, training was improved for drivers to make sure they knew how to travel on mountainous roads.^[4]

6 Child Check System

Some accidents are a result of someone not following protocols. In this instance, that resulted in one of the greatest tragedies involving school buses. On the morning of September 11, 2015, Armando Ramirez, a school bus driver for Public Transportation Cooperative in Whittier, California, started his route, picking up his three students and then heading to school to drop them off. After dropping them off, he returned to the transportation yard as usual and went home.

Several hours later, Paul Lee’s body was found lying in a pool of his own vomit inside Armando’s bus. He had unfortunately failed to notice that Paul had never got off the bus that morning to go to school. Once at the yard, Armando failed to follow protocols and check the bus to make sure there was no one in there. It was later determined that the bus driver’s negligence was to blame for the death of the student. As a result, a new law was passed in California stating that all school buses must have a child check system installed to force drivers to check their school buses.^[5]

5 Training for Hijacking

The following entry was a horrible experience for everyone involved, but it led to many advancements in the way these situations are handled. On July 15, 1976, Ed Ray, a 55-year-old school bus driver, picked up his students from school. Once on the road, he saw a van blocking the street with a man standing beside it. He slowed down to a stop; the man then approached the bus, holding a weapon. He took over the bus and drove it a mile down the road, where he met with two other men who helped him conceal the bus and take all 26 kids and the bus driver hostage.

The kidnappers drove them around for 11 hours in two modified cargo vans, eventually arriving at a rock quarry in Livermore, California—100 miles (161 kilometers) away. There, they transferred the hostages into a moving van buried in the quarry. Fortunately, the driver and an older boy were able to escape from the now-buried and collapsing van and seek help.

The men were caught and arrested shortly after. Today, several districts and transportation companies train their drivers on what to do if they are hijacked, and many buses now have GPS and video cameras in them, which prove to be very valuable in such a situation.^[6]

4 Emergency Response Teams

It’s not always the actual accident that causes death. Sometimes, they are due to aftereffects of the accident; this is evident in the next entry. It was February 28, 1958, and John Alex DeRossett was a 27-year-old bus driver tasked with transporting students to school in Prestonsburg, Kentucky. That morning, he picked up his students and made his way down U.S. Route 23. On the road, there was a tow truck attempting to pull out a pickup from a ditch. As the bus made its way down the road, it clipped the tow truck and made a hard left. This caused the bus to go down an embankment and into the Big Sandy River.

Twenty-two students were able to escape from the single rear emergency exit as the bus was sinking. The remaining 26 students and the bus driver were then dragged down the river and disappeared. The National Guard was dispatched on March 5, 1958. The search lasted days, which caused criticism for being too slow. This brought a change to disaster response by the creation of a disaster response team for the county, making it the first of its kind and inspiring many other similar response teams across the country.^[7]

3 School Bus Yellow and Two-Way Radios

The early days of school buses were much more challenging, especially during inclement weather. The following entry is a prime example that devastated one community. Carl Miller set out one beautiful morning in March 1931 to transport his students to school. But by the time he had reached the school, the weather changed drastically, and a blizzard ensued. Carl, along with the only two teachers at the school, decided it would be best if the students returned home for the day. Carl then began down the road, but on his way, he took a wrong turn.

At one point, the bus fell into a ditch, and the engine stalled, stranding the bus driver and its 22 passengers. Carl decided to leave the two older children in charge and set out on foot to look for help. That afternoon, two men found the bus and rescued the children. Unfortunately, the tragedy claimed six lives, including the bus driver’s. After the event, it was determined that school buses should sport a uniform, highly visible color, which became the school bus yellow we know today. In addition, two-way radios were integrated into all school transportation vehicles.^[8]

2 Fire Suppression System

It’s easy to think that school buses are so advanced today there is no possible way to make them any safer. This next entry shows that it is far from the truth. Megan Klindt was a 16-year-old student who attended Riverside Community High School. She left her home to wait for her school bus on December 12, 2017. After boarding the bus, the driver, 74-year-old Donald Hendricks, attempted to turn around on the street. He backed up, but unfortunately, the road was narrow, and he went too far back, resulting in the rear of the bus falling into a ditch. Hendricks attempted to get the bus out of the ditch by accelerating, but to no use; the bus wouldn’t budge.

Moments later, the bus was engulfed in flames. The fire was seen by Megan’s family, who quickly called 911. Unfortunately, the fire killed both Megan and Hendricks. A team was sent out by the NTSB to investigate the accident. They concluded the bus driver was unable to safely operate the bus while backing up, and the fire was determined to have developed due to the ignition of fuel on the engine’s turbocharger after it overheated. After the accident, the recommendation was to have all school buses outfitted with a fire suppression system.^[9]

1 Responsibility of Operator

Most school bus accidents can be blamed on a malfunctioning bus or an incompetent bus driver. Unfortunately, some accidents happen from sheer bad luck. Royal J. Randle was a 24-year-old World War II veteran who worked for the Lake Chelan School District. On November 26, 1945, Royal did his usual route consisting of picking up students on the west side of Lake Chelan. As Royal drove his school bus through the lakeside roads, it began to snow. Since there was very little snow on the pavement, he didn’t bother putting on snow chains.

The falling snow quickly accumulated on the school bus’s windshield. This caused the windshield wipers to stop working. As it kept accumulating, it caused visibility issues for Royal, and he decided to pull the bus off the road in order to clear the obstruction. As he pulled the bus over, though, he hit a rock, which caused the bus to veer into the 30-foot (9-meter) embankment, rolling over twice and coming to rest with the front end of the bus 5 feet (1.5 meters) underwater.

Five students and one adult were able to escape before the shifted weight of the bus caused it to sink into the lake headfirst. Within six days, divers found a total of seven bodies, including the bus driver’s. The search for the remainder of the passengers was called off shortly after, leaving nine children’s bodies unaccounted for.

The accident was investigated by the Washington State Patrol, who concluded that the poor visibility caused the driver to crash and veer off the road, ultimately driving the bus into the embankment. They went further by saying the school district had the responsibility of discontinuing the operation of the bus when there was inclement weather. Today, bus drivers, as well as the school districts, are responsible for judging when weather conditions are unsafe for pupil transport.^[10]

Holidays can be magical occasions, bringing families together and uniting communities in a common spirit of celebration. However, that much merriment can breed an equal amount of resentment from anyone on the outside. That much importance placed on any one day is bound to cause unfulfilled expectations. Beyond that, any time groups of people get together there is a potential for confrontation. Regardless of the reason why, some truly awful things happen on the holidays. Here are ten tragedies that happened on holidays, some so disturbing they’ll shock you.

10 The Covina Massacre

On Christmas Eve 2008, at a Christmas party in Covina, California, nine people were murdered by a man in a Santa costume. The man, Bruce Jeffrey Pardo, was motivated by his recent divorce settlement and spousal support payments. The divorce proceedings, which lasted months and ended only a week earlier, had cost Pardo a lot of money, and he wasn’t having it. He was having serious mental issues, though.

He constructed a plan to attack a Christmas party that his in-laws would be hosting and his ex-wife would be attending. He showed up in a Santa outfit, with a flamethrower that he wheeled in on a trolley and a total of four automatic handguns. Pardo killed nine people, either by gun or flamethrower, including his own 8-year-old niece, and set the home ablaze as partygoers fled. He committed suicide life later that night. But that was small restitution for his ex-wife and her family, who died suffering.

9 The Dresden Bombing

If you’ve read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five,” you’ve already heard of the horror that was the bombing of Dresden, Germany. On Valentine’s Day 1945, a fleet of over 1,00 planes from the British Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Forces attacked the German city, dropping almost 4,000 pounds of explosives. Casualty estimates vary due mainly to the indeterminable number of war refugees staying in the city. The conservative estimate is 25,000, and others rise steeply from there.

Critics of the bombing cite the city’s lack of military significance and its abundance of cultural significance to German society. Vonnegut, himself a German prisoner in Dresden during the bombing, tells of his experience gathering bodies for burial. Eventually, there were simply too many to bury and German troops began stacking them and incinerating them with flamethrowers.

8 The Shanghai Stampede

On New Year’s Eve in 2014, around 300,00 people gathered in Chen Yi Square in Shanghai, China. Along the banks of the Huangpu River, the crowd came to see a light show meant to celebrate the coming New Year. No one anticipated such a massive crowd, and there was little in the way of official crowd control to help organize everyone.

Just a few minutes before midnight, a stampede broke out among the crowd. Thousands surged into and trampled each other, leaving 36 people dead and 49 injured. Reports from the Chinese media were vague and conflicting as to what actually started the stampede, and as of now, no official cause is listed, just vague reports of crowd confusion and panic.

7 The Lawson Family Murders

On Christmas Day, 1929, farmer Charles Lawson killed his wife and six of his seven children. He started with two of his daughters, ambushing them by the family’s tobacco farm with a shotgun. He walked back to the porch and shot his wife Fannie. This alerted the rest of the children, who tried to hide in the house. He found them and killed them all. His last victim was their 4-month-old baby.

Lawson then neatly laid the bodies out, crossed their arms, and propped their heads up on rocks. He then vanished into the woods. Within hours, a crowd of neighbors had discovered or heard of the scene and gathered on the property. Witnesses heard a single gunshot come from the woods. They later found Lawson’s body, dead by suicide. No clear motive for Lawson’s gruesome spree has ever been determined, but there were rumors among family and friends that he had recently impregnated his daughter, one of the victims.

6 The Tool Box Killers

Lawrence Bittaker and Roy Norris were serial killers known as the Tool Box Killers. Considering their predilection for using an assortment of household tools to torture and kill their victims, it’s easy to see why they got that name. They claimed their fifth and final victim on Halloween night in 1979.

That night, they abducted young Shirley Lynette Ledford as she stood outside a gas station. They then proceeded to tie her up, rape her repeatedly, and torture her with their signature toolset before killing her. They dumped her body on a randomly chosen lawn, simply to see what the press would say about the location.

5 The Tangiwai disaster

A passenger train carrying 285 people was speeding across a bridge in New Zealand on Christmas Eve, 1953. Unbeknownst to the passengers and crew, a nearby dam had recently burst, causing a heavy surge of mud to pass under the bridge and damage its support structures. When the train passed over the bridge, its weight caused the whole structure to collapse. 151 of the 285 souls on board perished in the crash. Rescuers searched for days among the wreckage, hoping for survivors or at least identifiable bodies, but 20 passengers were never found, thought to have been carried downriver.

4 Ronald Sisman And Elizabeth Platzman

On Halloween night in 1981, New York City couple Ronald Sisman And Elizabeth Platzman were murdered in their home. The pair were savagely beaten and forced to their knees, then shot in the head execution-style. Because their house was ransacked and items of theirs had been stolen, police initially believed the whole event a robbery gone wrong.

Except that authorities were warned of the murders in advance. While in prison, infamous serial killer David Berkowitz, known better as “Son of Sam,” warned prison officials that the satanic cult he had belonged to was going to commit a ritual murder that Halloween night. He gave the correct murder location and described the home that the cult had been surveilling. It matched the description of the victims’ residence to a tee.

3 The Carnation Murders

The Carnation murders are named for the town in which they took place- Carnation, Washington, a tiny, rural town with no claim to fame except, sadly, this murder spree. Christmas Eve, 2007, saw Joseph McEnroe and Michele Anderson murder Anderson’s entire family. The two arrived at the home of Anderson’s parents, where the family was set the gather, and waited, guns in hand.

Anderson’s parents arrived first and were gunned down. Their bodies were hidden, the entranceway cleaned, and the murder trap reset. Then Anderson’s brother and sister-in-law arrived with their two children. They too were shot dead, children included. When asked why she did it, Anderson said that she had felt unfairly treated by her parents and that her brother owed her money, and McEnroe said… a string of incoherent nonsense.

2 Omaima Nelson

It was Thanksgiving Day, 1991, that Egyptian model Omaima Nelson murdered her husband. She claimed that it was in retaliation for him sexually assaulting her earlier that night. Perhaps that was true, but what happened after the murder was more ‘demonic cannibal’ than ‘avenger.’

After the alleged sexual assault, Nelson bound her husband and stabbed him in the chest with scissors. He survived that attack, so she bludgeoned him to death with a clothes iron, hitting him hard enough to break it. She then cut his body into small pieces, including castrating him and putting his severed head in her freezer. She put his severed hands in a pot to boil to remove fingerprints. She admitted to eating pieces of him, but later retracted these statements, saying that instead, she had merely put the missing pieces in the garbage disposal. All told, when investigators found her husband’s body, around 80 pounds of him were unaccounted for.

1 The Cocoanut Grove Fire

The Cocoanut Grove Fire is the single deadliest nightclub fire in history, killing 492 people. The Cocoanut Grove, which was unusually busy the night of the fire, was a popular club in Boston, Massachusetts. It was the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and many were in the city visiting family. Also, it was the first Thanksgiving after America joined World War Two and distraction destinations like clubs were thriving. The Cocoanut Grove was packed.

Investigators never determined the cause of the nightclub fire. They did say, however, that the fire started on the frond of an artificial palm tree. The fire spread through the ceiling and rapidly made its way into every area of the club, taking only five minutes to engulf the entire establishment. Side doors and several other exits had been bolted shut to prevent patrons from skipping out on their tabs. That left only one exit open—the front door. The door was a revolving door that was rendered inoperable by the throng of people trying to rush through it to safety. 492 people died in the fire. The small silver lining is that the incident triggered a wave of fire safety laws and regulations in hopes of preventing another tragedy of this magnitude.

Most tragic events make a historical splash, and some become positively iconic—Pompeii, the Titanic, the Rwandan genocide, etc. Others, however, drop off the public radar almost immediately (or never really reach it). Historical memory is a tricky thing. An event can be horrific and devastating yet still rapidly recede into the mists of memory if conditions are right (or wrong).

Sometimes the world moves on far too swiftly to the next tragedy, leaving memory only in the minds and hearts of those most affected; sometimes even survivors wish to forget the painful past; and sometimes disasters are deliberately minimized or suppressed. Against these tendencies stands the principle that the best honor that can be given to the lost is the privilege of memory.

Read on, then, and remember . . .

10 The Rana Plaza Collapse

The deadliest structural failure accident in modern history occurred in April 2013, and you’ve probably never heard of it. The infamous Boston Marathon bombing occurred the week before and garnered much media coverage with its three deaths and hundreds of wounded. But the collapse of this Bangladeshi building was a tragedy on a different order of magnitude: 1,134 people were killed, with more than twice as many injured.

Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, was home to the Rana Plaza structure, originally constructed to contain shops and offices. Yet multiple upper floors were added on, without a permit, in order to house the heavy machinery for multiple clothing factories. These factories manufactured goods for such prominent brands as Benetton, Prada, Gucci, and Versace and employed around 5,000 people. Few, if any, of them knew they were working in a top-heavy death trap.

Occupants of the building noticed cracks in the walls, ceilings, and floors on April 23, and the building was evacuated. Yet the building’s owner declared the structure safe and urged workers to return the following day. The shops and bank on the lower floors refused and remained closed, while the garment company managers threatened to dock the pay of any workers who failed to clock in.

Just before 9:00 AM the following morning, the entire structure failed, disintegrating into a pile of ruin that an eyewitness compared to a one-building earthquake. More than 3,000 people were in the building at the time, including garment workers, support staff, and children in the companies’ in-office nurseries. Some died instantly, while thousands more were entombed in the rubble.

The governmental reaction was mixed. Local emergency services responded as best they could, rescuing hundreds from the wreckage, and the government declared a national day of mourning on April 25. Yet there was also bureaucratic face-saving at work. UN offers of help were rejected by officials leery of negative international exposure.^[1] Volunteer rescue workers were ill-equipped and ill-led. The work dragged on. The last survivor, seamstress Reshma Begum, was not pulled out until 17 days later.

The tragedy lives on in the minds of Bangladeshis and certain international watchdog organizations, even though it has gotten little sustained attention elsewhere. Garment workers in the nation have protested substandard safety practices and low wages, though these protests have in some cases been violently suppressed. The owner of the building, Sohel Rana, is still awaiting judgment on multiple charges of murder.

9 The Spanish Flu

It seems absurd to describe a worldwide pandemic with a 50 million-plus death toll as “forgotten.” Indeed, in its day, the effect was very widely felt. Yet the strange aspect here is now little of a historical footprint this rampaging illness made. It seemed to disappear into distant memory very quickly.

It was certainly a sledgehammer blow at the time. A nasty strain of the influenza virus had developed among the trench-bound soldiers of World War I and traveled with them as they journeyed home. It was an ugly parting shot from that devastating war. Each stricken locale blamed it on somewhere else (hence the “Spanish flu” moniker; Spaniards called it the “French flu”), even though epidemiologists have never been able to determine a Ground Zero for the virus.

This flu was particularly severe. Most flu epidemics have a mortality rate of a tenth of a percent (meaning one out of every 1,000 infected persons dies). In 1918, the mortality rate worldwide was 20 percent—one out of every five. Badly affected victims would hemorrhage from the nose, stomach, and intestines. Secondary deaths killed even more, as bacterial pneumonia developed in compromised patients.

Unusually, the young and vigorous were hit hardest. This is partly explained by hardiness in the older population: An earlier flu pandemic in 1889 to 1890 had left its survivors with partial immunity. Another factor was the manner in which the Spanish flu killed—it caused cytokine storms, overreactions of the immune system which ravage the body. The stronger the immune system, the stronger the overreaction. The felling of the youthful only added to the skyrocketing economic and demographic cost of the pandemic, as fewer fit caretakers were left to tend to the ill.

Many of the best health and sanitation workers were among the afflicted, and public authorities were overwhelmed. The sheer number of sick was more than any nation’s health system had been designed to bear. Countries without systematic hospital systems were even worse off. From Peru to the Arctic Circle, people were dying in droves—with the flu claiming three to five percent of the world’s population in an 18-month period.

Yet there are few memorials to the event, and general interest in it subsided after the deaths stopped. One reason for this was the rapid, distributed nature of the pandemic—it killed suddenly in one area and then moved on, making it seem like other epidemic outbreaks that populations had experienced, if an especially nasty one. The enormity of the flu’s toll is best seen when analyzing the impact at a national or worldwide level, which most people simply did not have the opportunity to do. Moreover, the flu came on the tail of the world’s most devastating conflict to date; many people seemed to regard it as an accessory of the Great War tragedy, and the flu did not make a separate psychological impression upon them.^[2]

8 The Vaal Reefs Mine Disaster

Another modern disaster, this time in South Africa, is notable less for its death toll (at 104 deaths, the smallest on this list) than for its extremely bizarre circumstances. It combines the worst aspects of a mining disaster, an elevator failure, and a locomotive crash.

Mining is a major industry in South Africa, and some of the mines there are truly massive. The company AngloGold Ashanti maintains a large gold mine in the town of Vaal Reefs, so huge that internal locomotives are used to move workers, machinery, and ore back and forth on different lateral levels. These levels are, of course, served by vertical shafts that connect them to the surface and to one another. On May 10, 1995, 104 night shift workers were going up the #2 Shaft in a large elevator cage, ready to head home. They never got there.

Above them, in circumstances that remain unclear, a driver lost control of a locomotive and jumped clear. Switches designed to stop the engine if it was driverless failed, and multiple safety barriers could not stop the accelerating vehicle. It broke through and plunged straight downward, landing square on the ascending elevator. The winch cable broke instantly, and the two vehicles plunged together for 460 meters (1,500 ft), all the way to the bottom of the shaft.

Anyone aboard who wasn’t killed in the initial impact was crushed when the whole plummeting mass hit the shaft floor. Would-be rescuers who found the elevator cage reported that it had been compressed to half its normal size. Recovery efforts were particularly grisly. As a supervising government official described it:

At the moment they are cutting through the cage with blowtorches and they must take out a hand here, a foot there and bits of body and wrap it all up and bring it up to the surface. It was immensely sad to see human flesh mingled with steel two kilometres underground. And that is their grave. [ . . . ] It is something I will never forget.^[3]

Though some regulatory reforms and victims’ pensions resulted from the tragedy, most of South African and the world moved on. Vaals Reefs is best remembered by victim’s families, the local mining industry, and the Guinness Book of World Records—which records that May 10 as the date of the worst elevator accident in history.

7 The Aberfan Disaster

Continuing the theme of bizarre mining disasters brings us to Wales in the 1960s. There, a mining catastrophe claimed the lives of 144 people—all of them above the ground.

The Welsh village of Aberfan is nestled in a valley overlooked by a coal-rich mountain range. In 1966, it had a population of 5,000, most of them employed in the coal mines. Looming directly over the streets was a “spoil tip,” a heap of waste material removed during the mining process. The British National Coal Board had approved the location of the tip, despite its proximity to the town. The problem was that heaps of spoil are inherently less stable than virgin rock and vulnerable to liquefying after becoming saturated with water. Ominously, the tip was located over a natural spring, whose presence was well known to the NCB.

On the morning of October 21, Aberfan had just received three weeks of historic rainfall. Miners had just noticed slippage along the surface of the tip. And Pantglas Junior High School, less than 900 meters (3,000 ft) away, had just started classes for the day.

With booming thunder, roughly 110,000 cubic meters (3.9 million ft³) of spoil slurry began sliding down the mountain, a rapid half-flood, half-avalanche that engulfed the western edge of the village. Outlying farmhouses were obliterated, broken water mains added to the flow, and the school was swamped with debris. The choking, stinking mass flooded into the classrooms, flowing swiftly through doors and windows and quickly resolidifying into solid matter once it stopped moving.

When the booming avalanche stopped, an awful stillness welled up. As one of the trapped survivors remembered bitterly: “In that silence you couldn’t hear a bird or a child.”^[4]

A mound of solidifying debris more than 9 meters (30 ft) high covered the area. The lucky people were trapped in debris up to their waists or necks. 114 people in the school—all but five of them children—were not so lucky.

Miners streamed down from the mountainside, anxious to dig the children—including their own—out of the rubble. Their experienced efforts were impeded by other horror-stricken rescuers, whose frantic digging attempts had to be restricted lest they destabilize the whole mass again. No survivors were found after 11:00 AM.

A later inquiry faulted the NCB and several employees for creating the preconditions for the disaster, but no prosecutions or penalties resulted. Aberfan’s coal mine continued to operate until 1989. The tragedy is best remembered in Aberfan itself, where a memorial cemetery is located, and remains well-known in the UK. But the catastrophe is still little-known in the rest of the world.

6 The Victoria Hall Stampede

While we’re in Great Britain, we can examine an earlier disaster of similar scope and horror. Here, too, children were the primary victims—and the primary factor. The only avalanche at Victoria Hall was a human one.

In the summer of 1883, Victoria Hall, a theater in Sunderland, England, was hosting a children’s variety show. More than 1,000 children aged three to 14 were in attendance, many in the upstairs gallery seats. All was going well until the end of the show, when the entertainers began passing out prizes to some children in the audience. Those in the gallery were worried about missing out. So they started to run.

However, the door at the bottom of the staircase opened inward—and worse, it had been bolted mostly shut, leaving a gap so small that only one child could pass through at a time. This measure was apparently intended to ensure that tickets could be properly checked. It made the staircase a death trap.

The children who made it to the bottom first could not clear the way or warn those coming behind—so successive waves kept coming. The crushing tide was irresistible. As one child later recalled: “Suddenly I felt that I was treading upon someone lying on the stairs and I cried in horror to those behind ‘Keep back, keep back! There’s someone down.’ It was no use, I passed slowly over and onwards with the mass and before long I passed over others without emotion.”

Adults rushed to free the door but could not get at the bolt (also on the children’s side of the door) to do so. Eventually, a strong man wrenched the door from its hinges—only to find 183 little corpses on the other side.^[5]

At the time, the tragedy sent shock waves of horror throughout Great Britain. A disaster fund was set up—to which Queen Victoria contributed—and a memorial was raised in a park across the street. Outrage at the circumstances even led to legal changes. Soon afterward, push-bar (or “crash-bar”) doors became required for all public venues in Great Britain, a requirement that would soon be repeated throughout the world.

While the requirement remains, knowledge of the instigating disaster faded. The memorial, a statue of a grieving mother holding a dead child, degraded and was eventually vandalized. Admirably, it was restored in the early 2000s, and local historical groups have preserved some remembrance of the event for the future.

The next time you use a push bar, remember Victoria Hall.

5 The Great Smog Of London

Alongside stampedes, avalanches, and locomotive crashes, air pollution sounds unimpressive as a culprit for disaster. Even those who are aware of the problems of poor air quality tend to think of it as a low-grade or slow-motion problem. But such pollution managed to rack up extreme casualties in the capital of England in 1952.

Londoners are used to fog, but in early December of that year, the residents noticed an unusually dense, yellow-black cloud settling over everyone and everything. People could barely see in front of their faces; many compared the experience to being blind. Walking out of doors meant shuffling along with hands outstretched, feeling for obstacles. For four days, public transportation ground to a halt, ambulance service was suspended, and even events in large interior spaces were canceled, as the smog penetrated within.^[6]

There was no panic—but everywhere, the insidious effects mounted. Hypoxia and respiratory infections multiplied, with acute bronchitis or pneumonia resulting. The very young died, as did the very old or those with prior respiratory problems. When the smog finally cleared due to a shift in wind, authorities realized that over 4,000 people had died in the four days it had blanketed the city. Death rates trended high for months, inflated by smog-related complications. Modern research indicates the final death toll might have reached 12,000, with many more people suffering permanent health effects.

It was a cruel but simple combination of factors that caused the smog. Low-grade coal burned in residences, buildings, and power plants, all of which were poorly regulated at the time. Vehicle exhaust added to the fumes, and air masses settled in such a way as to trap noxious gases close to the ground. Some researchers even theorize that these conditions allowed concentrated sulfuric acid to accumulate at ground level.

As with some other distributed disasters, the true impact of this one was known best by health officials and regulators who took the time to gather and interpret huge amounts of data. Many of those who lived through it, or even lost loved ones because of it, may still not understand the enormity of the event.

4 The Ohio Penitentiary Fire

If hundreds of people burned to death in your average government facility, you’d get a ton of headlines. But if these people are “involuntary guests of the state” at a prison, those headlines will be converted to footnotes with disquieting speed.

The overcrowded 4,300 prisoners had just been locked in their cells on the evening of April 21, 1930, when a misplaced candle started a fire on the roof of one of the main cell blocks. The criminals, trapped before an advancing conflagration, clamored to be let out and allowed to save themselves. Some guards responded in humanitarian fashion and unlocked cell doors, but many more refused to do so.^[7]

As the human drama unfolded, the fire only grew. One narrow survivor remembered: “There was nothing to do but scream for God to open the doors. And when the doors didn’t open, all that was left was to stand still and let the fire burn the meat off and hope it wouldn’t be too long about it.” Some men began killing themselves rather than be cooked alive.

Other desperate inmates managed to overpower a guard, take his keys, and begin releasing their fellows. Only a few dozen were saved this way; suffocating smoke stymied the rescuers, and soon, the flaming roof collapsed on the cell block.

Angered over the mistreatment, surviving prisoners who had escaped their cells started to riot, hurling rocks at both guards and firefighters attempting to get close to the blaze. This created a standoff as prison authorities focused on containing the riot rather than the fire. Hundreds of military personnel were called in to restore order, even as the flames rose ever higher. By the time the ash settled, 322 inmates were dead, and another 230 were injured.

Newspapers at the time called the tragedy preventable, and some prison reform did result, in the form of the Ohio Parole Board, established in 1931. But there was no grand memorial or outpouring of public sorrow for the deceased. The most vital memory of the disaster was buried with them, and today, few people (aside from Ohio history buffs) have ever heard of that fiery April day.

3 The Salang Tunnel Incident

Our next calamity combines noxious gases, fire, and military silence. It is so shrouded in secrecy that details are sketchy, even nearly 40 years after the fact.

In 1982, Soviet military forces in Afghanistan were embroiled in a seemingly never-ending war with fierce local resistance fighters, the mujahedeen. Hindered by extremely inhospitable geography, the campaign saw units constantly compromised by their isolation and the surrounding terrain. At the frigid Salang Pass in the Hindu Kush mountain range, a terrain improvement (a 2.7-kilometer [1.7 mi] road tunnel) became the scene of a disaster.

All analyses agree that a Soviet military convoy was moving south through the tunnel on November 3, 1982, and that some fatal crisis occurred. Here, the accounts diverge. Some say a fuel tanker exploded, due either to a traffic accident or a mujahedeen attack (though local insurgents denied any role). Others say there was no explosion, only a traffic jam when two convoys tried to pass one another. But all accounts report that deaths began occurring rapidly thereafter.^[8]

Fire—if present—would have leaped from vehicle to vehicle, consuming flammable materials and fuel tanks and roasting people alive. It would also have quickly used up the oxygen in the tunnel, leading others to die of asphyxiation. On the other hand, Soviet military records claim that scores of people—Soviet soldiers and Afghans alike—died merely from carbon monoxide poisoning due to the many vehicle engines left running in the confined space. Death presided, though the number of dead is hotly disputed. Low estimates place the death toll at 100 to 200; high estimates reach as many as 2,700. Either way, life was cheap that day in the dark confines of the Salang Tunnel.

Whether it was an embarrassingly tragic accident, a successful attack by insurgents, or some combination of the two, the mysterious Salang Tunnel incident remains (arguably) the deadliest road accident in history.

2 The SS Leopoldville

Continuing the military secrets angle . . .

RMS Titanic’s sinking was so disastrous, in part, because of its remote location. More people could have been saved, if only there had been sufficient (and attentive) ships nearby. But a generation later, another ship went down with major casualties in the center of one of the world’s busiest sea lanes, the English Channel. And almost no one at the time heard about it.

It was Christmas Eve 1944. Rather than tucking themselves in for a long winter’s nap, however, men of the US 66th Infantry Division were hurrying aboard a Belgian transport ship, the SS Leopoldville. The ongoing Battle of the Bulge was in full-on crisis mode, and the 66th was part of the reinforcements being rushed to the front. Everything about the operation was hasty: the disorganized loading of the men, the poor excuse for a lifeboat drill, and the totally insufficient number of life jackets. When a surviving German U-Boat launched two torpedoes at the Leopoldville just before 6:00 PM, the stage had already been set for a disaster.^[9]

Roughly 300 infantrymen were killed instantly in the torpedo explosion or the immediate flooding which followed. Yet many more preventable deaths occurred. Evacuation orders were given in Flemish, which none of the American troops understood. The majority of crew members departed in lifeboats without encouraging the servicemen to follow. Most escort ships busied themselves searching for the U-boat, with only one (the destroyer HMS Brilliant) pulling alongside the stricken Leopoldville. Yet the massive size difference between the ships (Brilliant being much smaller) meant that the rescue ship could only take off about 500 men, and these had to clamber dozens of feet down the side of the sinking Leopoldville on scrambling nets while the heaving sea conditions hampered the effort. As one Brilliant crewman remembered:

Some men had started to jump down from a height of approximately 40 feet. Unfortunately limbs were being broken when they landed on the torpedo tubes and other fixed equipment on the starboard side of the upperdeck; some men fell between the two vessels and were crushed as the two vessels crashed into each other.

Leopoldville took more than two hours to sink. Several hundred Allied vessels were only 8 kilometers (5 mi) away in Cherbourg harbor, but most crewmen and radio operators were off duty at holiday parties. This fatally impeded the rescue operations. More than 500 men went down with the ship, with another 250 dying in the water or shortly thereafter. Most of these died of hypothermia.

Yet no newspapers carried headlines for the sunken transport, and no radio broadcasts listed the names of the dead. The reason was military secrecy. Wartime censors carefully blocked evidence from reaching the home front, to avoid demoralizing people or encouraging enemy resistance with news of the disaster. Survivors discharged at the end of the war were told not to talk about the incident, or they would lose their veterans’ benefits. It took many decades for the truth to become known—and it still remains underappreciated, even today.

1 The SS Cap Arcona

What could be worse than a boatload of soldiers drowned before they ever got the chance to fight? How about two boatloads of concentration camp survivors sunk by their own would-be rescuers?

In the choppy waters of the Baltic Sea on May 3, 1945, four German transports were steaming hard for Norway. Even as the Third Reich collapsed into ash, the architects of the Final Solution were sticking to their tasks. To that end, they loaded nearly 10,000 concentration camp prisoners aboard several vessels, including the converted ocean liner SS Cap Arcona. Forebodingly, the ship had seen prior use as an on-location set for the Nazi propaganda film Titanic (1943). The decks of the Cap Arcona, so recently used to reenact a dreadful sinking, were about to experience the real thing.

Allied forces, having received word that high-ranking Nazi SS officials were attempting to flee to neutral territory in Scandinavia, were eager to prevent this. Sighting the German prison flotilla—whose ships were not marked to signify their purpose, with prisoners locked out of sight belowdecks—British spotters assumed they were fair game and called in the fighter-bombers. The fat, slow, unprotected German ships made easy targets.^[10]

Horrific chaos reigned aboard the Cap Arcona. The Titanic’s often-exaggerated sealing of lower class passengers in the belly of the ship played out with appalling reality—SS guards ignored the cries of locked-in prisoners, appropriated life jackets for themselves, and abandoned ship. Many people, unfortunates who had endured months at Sachsenhausen and other death camps, were either burned alive in the spreading fires or entombed in the water-filled depths of the vessel. Of those who made it to the open water, most were ignored by German rescue ships—which focused on rescuing SS guards—while British aerial 20-millimeter cannons strafed the scene.

As one pilot remembered: “We used our cannon fire at the chaps in the water . . . we shot them up with 20 mm cannons in the water. Horrible thing, but we were told to do it and we did it. That’s war.” Some prisoners who made it through the maelstrom, still strong enough to swim, made it to the beach—where they were massacred by armed Hitler Youth members. In the end, only 350 of Cap Arcona’s 5,000 prisoners survived the day. With 2,750 additional dead from the accompanying Thielbek, it made for nearly 8,000 fresh corpses bobbing in the Baltic.

It’s hard to imagine the anguish of the British pilots upon learning that they had inadvertently killed so many of the people they were trying to liberate. Yet it must have paled in comparison to the anguish felt by the doomed prisoners in their final moments. They’d survived years of incredible privations, only to die now in sudden, inexplicable fashion. Most probably never knew the full extent of the tragedy—only their small, terrifying portion of it.

Most of the general public has never heard of it, either. Almost everyone involved had reason to forget: the Germans to deflect or mitigate the memory of their Holocaust guilt, the British to limit embarrassment at what was essentially a grand mal friendly fire issue, and the few survivors to exorcise the demons of one horrific incident among many. The few small memorials to the sad victims of the Cap Arcona are scattered among local cemeteries in Germany.

David F. Ellrod lives in Maryland with his wife, three children, and one very excitable dog. You can reach him at https://ourfamilycanvas.wordpress.com/ or on Twitter @DavidEllrod.

Legends of mythical monsters and creatures have sent chills down spines for hundreds of years. So intertwined have these stories become with everyday life that tragic incidents are sometimes blamed on these legendary creatures. For instance, the deaths of nine skiers on Dyatlov Pass were, for a long time, thought to be the handiwork of abominable snowmen living in the northern Urals. Likewise, when two young girls tried to stab their friend to death in a forest in Wisconsin, they blamed the mythical Slender Man, claiming they had been forced to commit the crime to prevent Slender Man from harming their families.

On this list are more devastating incidents that have, to some extent at least, been blamed on creatures of folklore.

Related: 10 Bizarre Legal Actions Regarding Mythical Creatures

10 Bigfoot Kidnapping

Ever since the infamous Gimlin footage made headlines in 1967, there has been a horde of Bigfoot sightings in the U.S. despite experts dismissing the entire concept as being either a hoax or simply ludicrous.

In 1987, things took a turn for the tragic when 16-year-old Theresa Ann Bier apparently decided to skip school and go Bigfoot hunting in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California on June 1. Accompanying her was 43-year-old Russell Welch, who returned from the outing alone. Theresa was reported missing, and when authorities inevitably questioned Russell, he claimed that he last saw the teenager on June 2, after they’d both encountered Bigfoot and she chased after it. According to Russell, Bigfoot had abducted Theresa. He also changed his story several times, adding more and more details to it.

Not believing the story for one second, police arrested Russell Welch on June 11th but had to release him when no sufficient evidence against him could be found. A thorough search that included sniffer dogs in the area where Theresa was last seen yielded no success other than discovering what was believed to be her purse and scraps of her clothing.

To date, no one has been prosecuted for her disappearance, and her fate remains a mystery.^[1]

9 Mermaid Drowning

In December 2013, 12-year-old Siyabonga Masango left his home to play soccer with his friends. A while later, the heat led to the boys deciding to go swimming in a tributary of the Sabie River in Mpumalanga, South Africa.

A man washing his car nearby saw Siyabonga being pulled into the water and rushed over to help. Unfortunately, they couldn’t see or find him inside the water. Police divers searched for two weeks but also couldn’t locate the boy, believing that he had drowned after being attacked by a crocodile.

Siyabonga’s family was not convinced, believing instead that a mermaid had taken their son but that he would be “released”’ in time to go to school. The family also performed rituals to ensure that this would be the case. Siyabonga was never found, however, and his ultimate fate remains unknown.^[2]

8 Ghostly Vengeance

In June 2018, two men in the Thai village of Tambon Dong Yai in Nakhon Ratchasima’s Phimai district died in their sleep. Concerned residents set off to the local medium to hold a rite and call up spirits for an explanation. According to the medium, the ghost of a widow told her that she wanted to kill four men in the village, and as she’d already taken the lives of two, two more would soon follow.

Upon hearing this, several villagers hung a red shirt in front of their homes, hoping that it would keep the ghost away. Some even added a note stating that there were no men in their house, only pets.

Apparently, no other men suffered the same fate as the first two after the red shirts were displayed outside houses.^[3]

7 Alien Abduction

The disappearance of Amelia Earhart spawned a slew of conspiracy theories even after the Navy officially concluded that Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan had most likely run out of fuel, after which they crashed into the Pacific Ocean and drowned.

These theories ranged from Earhart and Noonan landing on Nikumaroro and living as castaways until they died, being taken prisoner by the Japanese, or that they were eaten by coconut crabs after crashing somewhere near Howland Island.

Naturally, there would also be a far stranger theory in the mix, with some believing that Earhart was taken by aliens on the day she was to land on Howland Island and sent to a wormhole where she was left in suspended animation.

A version of this theory was included in the popular anthology horror series, American Horror Story, in which a character claims to be Amelia Earhart and makes contact with aliens.^[4]

6 Demonic Murder

Demons and evil forces are prominently featured in folklore, mythology, fiction, occultism, and religion. Going hand-in-hand with these stories are tales of demon possession and exorcism. In modern times, many crimes have been blamed on demons and evil creatures.

In 2016, Aljar Swartz admitted killing and beheading 15-year-old Lee Adams and burying her head in his backyard in Cape Town, South Africa. It was only after his trial, and after psychiatrists and psychologists found him mentally stable, that Swartz’s lawyer suddenly announced that his client was demon-possessed and requested for an exorcism to take place in Swartz’s prison cell where he was awaiting sentencing.

The lawyer also insisted on getting a retired Methodist minister to perform the exorcism after Swartz allegedly told him that a demon in the form of a black lizard appeared to him in his cell and tormented him. Swartz also said that the lizard would crawl into his chest and “control” him. The lawyer argued that his client was a “vessel” and “instrument in the hand of the devil” and could not be held accountable for Lee’s murder.

The court eventually found that Swartz murdered Lee Adams for the purpose of selling her head to a sangoma—a practitioner of herbal medicine, divination, and counseling in some traditional South African societies. He was sentenced to 22 years in prison.^[5]

5 By Order of the Vampire Queen

In 2002, 22-year-old Allan Menzies murdered his 21-year-old friend, Thomas McKendrick. Menzies then ate part of his head, drank his blood, and buried him in a shallow grave. During his murder trial, Menzies stated that Akasha, the “Vampire Queen” in the film The Queen of the Damned, had repeatedly instructed him to kill his friend. He also said that he’d watched the film more than 100 times and that Akasha told him if he murdered people, she would reward him by turning him into an immortal.

Menzies further said that he’d made up his mind to kill McKendrick after McKendrick insulted Akasha. He also believed that he was indeed a vampire after the murder and said he didn’t really “feel anything” after McKendrick died.

Menzies was handed a life sentence for the crime in 2003 but was found dead in his prison cell in 2004. It is believed that he committed suicide.^[6]

4 Monster Behind the Mystery

Originating from Norwegian folklore, the Kraken is one of the most feared mythologic beasts. Legend has it that the monster was so big that sailors would often mistake it for an island and try to land on it, only to be dragged to a watery grave. Respected zoologist Carl Von Linné listed the Kraken as a real creature in Systema Naturae. Many believe that such a monster truly existed after Ichthyosaur bones were found in a pattern similar to how octopuses place bones when they’re done with their meal.

Colliding with another mystery, the Kraken has been blamed for the mysterious disappearances of boats and planes in the Bermuda Triangle. Some believe that a super-intelligent Kraken lurks in the depths of the triangle and “feeds” on ships and aircraft.

The Kraken has even been blamed for the Mary Celeste disappearance, even though the legendary ship vanished in a completely different part of the sea.^[7]

3 Quota of Lives

The Higginson Highway in Chatsworth, Durban, South Africa, is notorious for fatal accidents. Here, rocks are often hurled at cars from overhead bridges, after which injured motorists are robbed of their belongings. At other times, drivers lose control of their vehicles and veer off the highway, rolling down the embankment. Sometimes head-on collisions lead to tragic deaths.

Many of these accidents have been attributed to the highway’s resident ghost, aptly named Highway Sheila. Being the restless spirit that she is, it is believed that Sheila has a “quota of lives” to fulfill each year, and she achieves this goal by appearing in the middle of the road, causing drivers to swerve, leading to often-fatal accidents.

Recently, a young Metro police officer and his family were traveling home late at night on the Higginson Highway when he almost hit a woman in white standing in the middle of the lane. They were all terrified by the incident but believed that God had saved them from harm.^[8]

2 Wendigo Psychosis

Filling several pages of Algonquian books on legendary creatures, tales of the Wendigo describe the creature as a humanoid cannibal with antlers who feasts on human flesh to survive harsh and cold climates. Legend has it that the first-ever Wendigo was a hunter who got lost in the wild during winter and was driven to cannibalism to survive. This saw him morph into a Wendigo, doomed to roam the forest in search of more victims.

In the 1800s, a Cree man named Swift Runner slowly became addicted to alcohol, got fired from his job as a guide for the North West Mounted Police, and became increasingly violent as time passed. In 1878, Swift Runner led his wife, six children, mother-in-law, and brother into the woods, killed them, and ate them.

Police found broken hollowed-out bones in the woods as well as a pot of human fat and arrested Swift Runner. He told police that he had been possessed by a Wendigo, which led to him committing the massacre.

No one believed him and Swift Runner was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed in December 1879.^[9]

1 Lurking Leviathan

Described in Caribbean folklore as a 75-foot half-dragon, half-octopus, the lusca is a sea monster said to inhabit the waters surrounding Andros island in the Bahamas. Some versions of the tale say that the creature sports the head and torso of a shark and the lower body of an octopus.

One theory has it that the lusca, or lurking Leviathan as it’s sometimes called, is the ghost of a woman who drowned and was turned into a beast. Another says that a lusca is a mermaid or siren put on Earth by nymphs to lure sailors to their death.

The TV show, River Monsters, aired an episode dedicated to the lusca monster, which explores the possibility that the creature could be responsible for the disappearance of a number of swimmers exploring the blue holes surrounding Andros. The missing people include 38-year-old Liu Guandong, Wesley Bell, and 72-year-old John William Batchelor. Batchelor’s boat has been found, but he remains missing.^[10]

Founded in 1910, the Boy Scouts of America currently has over 2.4 million youth participants and about one million adult volunteers. The organization prides itself on instilling a moral compass in its youthful members as well as helping them to participate in various outdoor activities.

See Also: 10 Dark Origins of Beloved Organizations

From camping and hiking to aquatics and fire building, such undertakings come with risks. Through the years, these activities have cost many lives. Here, we’ll look at some horrors that have befallen unsuspecting, adventure-seeking Scouts and their leaders in some of the most unforeseeable circumstances.

10 Freak Accidents

On the first day of the 2005 National Scout Jamboree in Virginia, four Boy Scout leaders took on the physical task of erecting a dining tent. Moments later, a weekend that was supposed to be filled with festivity turned tragic.

As the men were raising one of the metal poles, it tilted and struck a power line, setting ablaze the entire pavilion. While their children and fellow Scouts looked on in horror, the canvas—engulfed in flames—encased the men within the inferno. On that dreadful afternoon, Michael J. Shibe (49), Ronald H. Bitzer (58), Scott E. Powell (57), and Michael Lacroix (42) perished amid their loved ones.

Their deaths were eerily similar to those of three Boy Scouts in 2017 after their sailboat struck an overhead power line in East Texas. The boys—Thomas Larry (11), Heath Faucheux (16), and William Brannon (17)—were just offshore when the incident set their boat on fire.^[1]

Unfortunately, freak accidents among the Scouts are more commonplace than we may realize.

Case in point: In October 2018, a 12-year-old Michigan boy was buried alive while tunneling through a sand dune. Four months earlier, a 14-year-old Scout in Georgia was killed when a tree snapped in 80 kilometer-per-hour (50 mph) winds. It fell on his tent and crushed him.

The teen’s death was nearly identical to the tragedy that befell a 13-year-old boy and a 29-year-old volunteer in July 2016 when high winds caused a tree to fall in their camp. From drunk drivers plowing through hiking expeditions to flash floods sweeping Scout leaders and children to their deaths, exploring the great outdoors undeniably comes with risks.

9 Branding Recreations

In the Boy Scouts, it is common practice for adult leaders (who act as role models and mentors) to create their own activities within the troop. Such recreation can include camping trips, community service, and leadership activities.

In 1982, two Scout leaders from Missouri had a different notion when it came to insightful guidance and growth. While on a weekend campout in Huntsville, J.B. Gatzmeyer, 37, and Kenneth Willard, 19, had the bright idea to leave a lasting impression on seven boys whose ages ranged from 11 to 15.

Armed with a heated coat hanger twisted into the shape of male genitalia, Willard branded the buttocks of six of the boys—with one receiving brands on both arms—while Gatzmeyer sat on their legs. Evidently, the two stooges with an odd sense of humor said that the boys would be banned from future outings if they did not participate in the branding.

Gatzmeyer and Willard topped off the evening by giving each other brands on their own rear ends.^[2]

Of all the Scouts, the 11-year-old refused to participate. Even after threats of castration, the boy stood his ground. Although he left without a new tattoo, he probably arrived home with some psychological damage.

Ultimately, each of the so-called “mentors” was convicted of assault and related charges and sentenced to one year in prison. For unspecified medical reasons, Gatzmeyer was released after serving just three months.

8 Routine Tragedy

In summer 1982, 29 Boy Scouts and adults set out on an expedition around and on the mountain lakes in southeastern British Columbia. Unexpectedly, a storm swept through the region while the boys and their Scout leaders were rowing through the waters of Lake McNaughton.

In the aftermath of the downpour, two canoes were lost along with their occupants. Following a lengthy air search, the bodies of four teenage American Scouts and two adults were pulled from the icy waters. They were still wearing their life jackets.

Sadly, drowning is a common occurrence in the organization. Between 2005 and 2010, several Scouts drowned while partaking in outdoor activities. In fact, within the same time span, a total of 32 boys, leaders, and invited guests were killed.^[3]

The majority of these deaths were attributed to blunt force head trauma due to falling trees, rocks, and even totem poles. Lightning strikes, severe burns, and hyperthermia have also been factors on several occasions. Although the Boy Scouts have taken drastic measures to ensure the safety of their members, freak accidents and unforgiving Mother Nature have continued to produce tragedies over the last 100 years.

7 Nowhere To Run

On June 11, 2008, an EF3 tornado descended on the Little Sioux Scout Ranch in western Iowa with winds of 233 kilometers per hour (145 mph). In a state of hysteria, all Scouts were ordered to take refuge in their cabins because there were no basements or in-ground shelters.

As the tornado hit, one cabin was leveled, causing the brick chimney to collapse onto the boys. Overall, more than 40 individuals were injured. Many sustained broken bones that required multiple surgeries and months of rehabilitation.

Sadly, four teenage Scouts—Ben Petrzilka, Sam Thomsen, Josh Fennen, and Aaron Eilerts—perished after being crushed by falling concrete and debris. The survivors described “scenes of chaos” that attracted the attention of local and national media outlets.

In the months following, the parents of the deceased boys and some of the surviving Scouts were invited to the White House, where they met then-President George W. Bush. Over the next five years, the camp constructed two concrete tornado shelters with steel doors built to withstand an EF5 tornado. Today, a chapel sits on the site where the four boys lost their lives.^[4]

6 Unanswered Heartache

Returning home from a church-sponsored camping trip in Blackstone, Virginia, four Boy Scouts were passengers in an SUV driven by Scoutmaster John Oliver. It was November 5, 2006, and weather conditions were clear and calm with no foreseeable dangers.

For reasons that remain unknown, Oliver, 43, veered off the road and struck a large maple tree in Southampton County. The road was unremarkable other than a slight curve that did not require a car to slow down from the posted “55 mph” speed limit.

The explosion from the crash drew locals out of their homes. They rushed to the scene to find 12-year-old Michael-John Oliver, the son of the driver, lying on the asphalt. With a broken leg, Michael-John had summoned the strength to crawl from the burning vehicle before it burst into flames.

As the boy waited with bystanders for first responders to arrive, Luke Drewry (12), Jackson Fox (13), Carter Stephenson (14), and Michael-John’s father, John, remained trapped inside, where they perished. Parents awaiting the arrival of their children from the retreat were at church when they received the heartbreaking news that their sons would not be coming home.

Reports indicate that Oliver—a former Marine who had survived a 1983 bombing in Beirut that killed 241 of his fellow US servicemen—had no difficulties navigating earlier curves. Authorities “don’t know why he didn’t negotiate the curve.”^[5]

5 Circle Of Fire

Flammable liquids used as fire starters have been prohibited by the Boy Scouts since the organization’s inception. Whenever a fire is necessary, two adults are required to supervise. Such standards were neglected on the evening of July 6, 2008, at the Joseph A. Citta Reservation in Waretown, New Jersey.

That evening, 18-year-old Eagle Scout Brian Lenz was showing off to a group of Scouts a trick he called “circle of fire.” Channeling his inner Houdini, Lenz squirted rubbing alcohol in a pattern on a table and then set it alight. Believing that the flame was dying, the Eagle Scout poured on more alcohol. Within a second, the liquid stream caught fire and found its way back to the bottle he was holding.

Lenz was frantically waving his hand in a futile attempt to extinguish the burning bottle when he released the firestorm onto the other Scouts. An explosion ensued, severely burning three boys. One of them, 17-year-old Sean Whitley, succumbed to his injuries four days later.

In the aftermath, Lenz pleaded not guilty to third-degree aggravated assault and struck a deal allowing him to enter a pretrial intervention program. In doing so, he avoided jail time as well as any criminal record.

When all was said and done, Lenz left the Ocean County Superior Court “smiling and in high spirits.” To add insult to injury, he was not stripped of his status as an Eagle Scout. According to Scout executive Craig H. Shelley, “When a boy earns Eagle Scout, he does that on his own. They maintain it forever, so he is still an Eagle Scout.”^[6]

4 A Wrong Turn

On November 15, 1958, six Boy Scouts set out on a hike in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson. The temperature was comfortably warm with calm winds and no chance of rain. It was supposed to be a scenic, joyous occasion for the kids who were celebrating the 12th birthday of fellow Scout David Greenberg.

At some point in their journey up the mountain, three Scouts decided to head back down due to fatigue. It was the last time that anyone saw them alive. At the time, methods of weather forecasting were unsophisticated and they missed an approaching storm.

It ravaged the terrain and changed the lives of three families forever. As the sun set, the winds kicked up and showers poured from the sky. By midnight, several feet of snow blanketed the trails, the landmarks, and the bodies of the three boys.^[7]

In the days that followed, approximately 700 volunteers scoured the area in a fruitless effort that brought no closure. Nineteen days later, on December 4, a rancher tending to his land confirmed everyone’s worst fear.

Lost and unprepared for the subfreezing temperatures, Mike Early, Michael LaNoue, and birthday boy David Greenberg had frozen to death. Their bodies were carried off the mountain by soldiers from Fort Huachuca who stacked rocks and erected crosses where the boys’ lives had tragically come to an end.

3 Knife-Wielding Paranoid Schizo

In August 2011, Valerie Henson of northern Indiana called 911 to report that her son, 22-year-old Shane Golitko, had assaulted her in the home they shared. With a broken arm, Henson fled to a neighbor’s house while her crazed son grabbed a large knife and took off into the woods.

At that time, 76-year-old Arthur L. Anderson was leading a hiking trip near Bunker Hill when he stopped the young Scouts to discuss a particular tree. Moments later, the knife-wielding lunatic emerged from the brush and plunged the 30-centimeter (12 in) knife into Anderson’s neck.^[8]

As suddenly as he had appeared, Golitko vanished. The boys were physically unharmed yet horrified as they watched their beloved Scout leader bleed to death right before their eyes.

Returning home, Golitko stabbed his two dogs, broke windows, and trashed the entire house before escaping in his mother’s Jeep. A 13-kilometer (8 mi) chase with police ensued before he was finally apprehended.

Diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, Golitko claimed that he had stopped taking his antipsychotic medications. After pleading guilty but mentally ill to murder, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

2 Alone In A Tent

On April 24, 1970, six instructors and 24 boys arrived on the expansive grounds of St. Basil the Great Catholic Church in Pennsylvania. About 183 meters (600 ft) from the church buildings, the group of wide-eyed young children enjoying the beauty of spring had set up camp while blissfully anticipating the weekend ahead.

All innocence ended less than 48 hours later. In the early morning hours of April 26, the lifeless body of 11-year-old Terry Bowers was discovered. Alone in his tent, the boy had been stabbed four or five times while lying in his green sleeping bag. The sheer brutality was almost as incomprehensible as the reason why someone would commit such a monstrous and senseless murder.^[9]

The only break for detectives came from Lawrence Wakely, a former Scout and convicted rapist. Speaking to authorities, the mentally ill Wakely admitted to killing Bowers in retaliation for being kicked out of the Boy Scouts a decade earlier.

Upon further questioning, however, Wakely could not respond to questions that only the killer would have been able to answer. After being ruled out as a suspect, the case went cold again and has remained so for the last several decades.

1 ‘The Killer Was Here’

The night was riddled with eerie happenings. From shadowy figures and strange noises to faint screams and cries, the Girl Scout Camp outside Locust Grove, Oklahoma, will forever be remembered as a place of horrors. Though we’ve focused on the Boy Scouts until now, what happened to three girls in the middle of the night four decades ago continues to haunt countless residents.

In the early morning hours of June 13, 1977, a counselor walking the campgrounds discovered the body of 10-year-old Doris Milner sprawled along a dirt trail. Nearby lay Lori Farmer, 8, and Michelle Guse, 9, dead inside their zipped sleeping bags a short distance from their tent. Two of the girls had been beaten to death while the other had been strangled. All three had been sexually assaulted.^[10]

Three K9s hailed as “wonder dogs” were rushed in from other states to aid in the investigation but were of no help. The sinister atmosphere was compounded when one of the dogs was killed after inexplicably dashing onto the road while another died of heatstroke.

Scrawled on the wall of a nearby cave, searchers discovered the taunting message, “77-6-17. The killer was here. Bye Bye fools.” In the end, the only piece of evidence recovered was a single hair found on the body of one of the girls. Analysis suggested that it was from a Native American.

This led sheriffs to Gene Hart, a Cherokee fugitive with a lengthy rap sheet. In 1966, Hart had received three 10-year sentences for raping two pregnant women, but he was paroled in 1969. Less than three months later, he was back in jail for burglary. But he escaped in 1973.

Hart remained in hiding until April 1978 when police tracked him to a remote tar paper shack. His trial began a year later and ended with a not guilty verdict because the evidence “didn’t add up” to the jury.

Even so, Hart was sent back to prison following his trial to serve more than 300 years for earlier crimes. In June 1979, he died in prison after suffering a heart attack at age 35. To date, the brutal murders of Doris, Lori, and Michelle remain unsolved.

Tragedies such as bombings, wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and personal calamities have left a permanent dent in history’s timeline. As modern generations navigate their own catastrophes, the events of yesteryear still echo, demanding never to be forgotten.

On this list are haunting images taken during and after terrible tragedies. They reflect the severe impact of these events at the time and in the years to come.

Warning: Some images may disturb sensitive viewers.

10 Shadows Remain After Bodies Are ‘Vaporized’ During Nuclear Blast

When the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, people were going about their day not knowing the terror at hand. The intense heat from the blast caused “shadows” to be burned into nearby surfaces, reflecting the object that had been there mere seconds before.^[1]

This happened with human victims as well. Their likenesses were burned into the walls or surfaces closest to where they were standing or sitting when the blast occurred. This picture is the last reminder of a man who had been sitting or walking on the stairs as the bomb hit. For more sobering facts nearly lost to time, read 10 Facts Everyone Forgets About World War II.

9 Monument To Commemorate Fallen New Zealand Soldiers

Two years after the fierce Battle of the Somme during World War I, New Zealand soldiers erected a massive cross in memory of the comrades who had lost their lives during the fighting.^[2] This photo depicts two of these soldiers digging a hole in which to erect the monument.

Surprisingly, there have also been people who have erected monuments to their foes. Read more at 10 Times People Erected Public Monuments To Their Enemies.

8 Listening For Signs Of Life

On December 28, 1959, part of the Coalbrook mine just outside Sasolburg in the Free State, South Africa, collapsed, injuring one miner. A mine inspector was called in. He visited the site within two weeks but was not told of the incident. His report didn’t show any abnormalities inside the mine.

Tragically, on January 21, 1960, Section 10 of the mine collapsed piece by piece while 1,000 miners were underground. 435 miners remained trapped after the rest were able to escape.^[3]

This picture depicts rescue workers sinking sound equipment into the shaft to try to hear signs of life from the trapped miners. Rescue efforts continued in vain for two weeks. On February 5, 1960, it was decided that all efforts should be stopped. All 435 miners died underground, and their bodies were never brought to the surface.

Unfortunately, horrific fatal accidents have occurred aboveground, too. Read about some of the most frightening in Top 10 Freak Airplane Incidents And Accidents.

7 More Than 900 Drink Laced ‘Kool-Aid’ At The Behest Of A Crazy Cult Leader

On November 19, 1978, Jim Jones murdered more than 900 people in Guyana. He gave them cyanide-laced Flavor Aid to drink after telling them to synchronize their watches.^[4]

The result was mass death rivaled only by the events of 9/11. This grim picture is a reminder of how easy it is for charismatic psychopaths to infiltrate the minds of vulnerable people. Even so, there are some angles to this story that point in another direction. To learn more, check out 10 Things That Don’t Quite Add Up About The Jonestown Massacre.

6 If I Fail, He Dies

In an image eerily reminiscent of the situation the world is currently facing, this picture depicts Red Cross volunteers making face masks during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.^[5]

The pandemic lasted from January 1918 to December 1920 and resulted in the deaths of over 50 million people worldwide. One can only imagine the type of determination that resulted from the poster stuck against the flag in the background. Unfortunately, this is not the only pandemic the world has faced. Read more at Top 10 Deadly Pandemics Of The Past.

5 Walking Into Disaster

The image on the left shows the crew on their way to board the Space Shuttle Challenger for their mission to space on January 28, 1986. They look happy, excited, and obviously completely unaware that they will not return alive. Or at all.^[6]

Seventy-three seconds after the launch of the Challenger, the spacecraft broke apart in the air, killing all aboard. To discover more about space catastrophes, read 10 Horrific Disasters Of The Space Program.

4 Leaving War Only To Find Heartbreak

After surviving the devastation of World War II, this unnamed German soldier couldn’t wait to return home.^[7]

Tragically, as he arrives at the place he once called home, he finds nothing but burned remains of the structure. Then he learns that his entire family died after air raids by Allied forces. Get your tissues ready before you click to read more heartbreaking tales in 10 Incredibly Tragic Stories Surrounding Devastating Wars.

3 Soldiers Horrified By Footage Of Concentration Camps

Although many Germans were aware of the mass slayings of Jewish people during the Holocaust, it is believed that some did not know about the atrocities in concentration camps. By the beginning of 1945, an estimated 1.1 million people had been killed at Auschwitz.^[8]

This image reflects the horror that some German soldiers (who were prisoners of war) experienced after being forced to watch footage from the concentration camps in 1945. Despite all the tragedy, there was still some hope as told in 10 Remarkable People Who Escaped From Auschwitz.

2 Punishment For Not Meeting Daily Quota

During the reign of King Leopold II of Belgium in Congo, the man in this picture, Nsala, failed to reach his daily rubber collection quota in 1904. As punishment, the Belgian overseers cut off his five-year-old daughter’s hand and foot.^[9]

Nsala is staring at the dismembered remains here. The overseers then killed his daughter and wife and cannibalized both. If you want to know more about the atrocities that occurred in the Congo Free State under Leopold’s rule, click on 10 Horrifying Facts About The Genocide In The Congo Free State.

1 Barely Alive

This disturbing photograph is just one piece of evidence of the atrocities that occurred in the Andersonville Prison, eventually known as the worst prisoner-of-war camp ever in the US. Soldiers were fed regularly; prisoners were not.^[10]

The man in this image, a Union Army soldier, barely survived the Andersonville Prison after wasting away from hunger during the US Civil War. He was eventually released in May 1865. You can read more about Andersonville at Top 10 Infamous Wartime Prisons.