With the holidays wrapping up here in the Western world, many of us still have our Christmas lights up, our bellies full, and plenty of other cheerful things hanging around to remind us of our recent celebrations. Holidays in this day and age are a great way for us to share, laugh, love, and make memories with our friends and loved ones.

But how often do we stop and consider the roots of our holidays and the events from which they were born? Most people with an Internet connection know that many modern holidays are a hodgepodge of ancient pagan practices which have been augmented or adopted in various forms by the surviving religions.

But beyond just ancient paganism, many holidays stem from historical events. Sometimes, those events are quite dark and not exactly the nice, cheery tales we’d expect such holidays to spring from. Here are 10 holidays with unusually dark and strange histories.

10 The Death Of St. Patrick

Most of us in the Western world who celebrate the holiday, especially if we’re not particularly religious or even armchair historians, think of St. Patrick’s Day as a fun festival marked by the consumption of copious amounts of beer. St. Patrick’s Day has always been a religious holiday, but Irish immigrants who came to the United States in search of a better life greatly popularized it as a secular holiday, solidifying it as a representation of Irish culture.

But the holiday didn’t have a happy-go-lucky beginning. It’s actually the celebration of the death of St. Patrick. His life was hard from the beginning. When the Romans occupied Great Britain in the fifth century, St. Patrick was just a 16-year-old boy who was captured and taken to Ireland from Britain as a slave.

Somehow, in 432, St. Patrick managed to escape slavery and become a force for Christianity by converting the then-pagan Irish to the religion and establishing monasteries and places of worship. He was said to have died on March 17, 493, which would have made him over 100 years old. However, historians generally agree that he actually died in 461, which is a bit more realistic.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of the day of his death. Even more dark and unusual than that are the events that ensued after his death.

The Battle for the Body of Saint Patrick took place when two rival factions fought over who had the proper rights to the corpse. However, things get a little mythological in the account in Annals of the Four Masters, the work that describes the battle.^[1]

It concludes with a scene where the rival factions end up on a river to do glorious, bloody battle for the rights to the corpse of the beloved saint. Allegedly, the river rose up and flooded upon their arrival. Both sides walked away with what they believed to be the body of St. Patrick, and it was attributed to a divine miracle that the battle was stopped.

Odd beginnings for a holiday of green beer, fun, and leprechauns.

9 Good Friday

For a holiday with such a nice name as Good Friday, its historical origins are rather dark in nature. However, Good Friday came from the ancient Germanic culture and language and was long ago Karfreitag (“Sorrowful Friday”). Before the contemporary world got hold of it, the holiday was celebrated by fasting, by asking for forgiveness from sin, and by general sorrow-filled reflection on behalf of the practitioners.

If you think about it, this makes sense. Good Friday is a holiday that was born out of betrayal, greed, and execution. For most of its history, it wasn’t the wonderful holiday that we make it out to be, but rather the celebration of the death of Jesus Christ.

Traditionally, monks and devout religious people saw this as a day of observance and remembrance and of somber reflection—not just the prequel to Easter Sunday. Some people even hold services that last three hours in remembrance of the amount of time that Jesus was said to have suffered upon the cross.^[2]

8 The Friday Of Sorrows

The lesser-known holiday of the Friday of Sorrows takes place on the Friday before Good Friday and dates back to the medieval times of Europe. It’s like Good Friday, only for the Virgin Mary, where worshipers and the devoutly religious celebrate the suffering of the Virgin Mary as she witnessed her son dying on the cross. This remembrance takes place mainly in predominantly Catholic countries rather than Protestant Christian ones.

Also known as the Feast of the Seven Sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary, this holiday was not only meant to remember the suffering that Mary experienced while Jesus was on the cross but also seven of the sorrows that took place over the course of Mary’s life.

From Mary receiving the prophecy of Simeon to desperately fleeing into Egypt after Jesus’s assumed birth, losing Jesus in Jerusalem as mentioned in Luke 2:43–49, and watching Jesus be executed, taken off the cross, and buried, the Feast of the Seven Sorrows is perfectly dark in the way that only a medieval holiday could be.^[3]

7 The Night Of Broken Glass

This is a dark holiday observed in Germany in remembrance of one of the most atrocious events of all time: the Holocaust. Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass, refers to the acts that led to the events that would eventually transpire at Auschwitz concentration camp.

On the night of November 9, 1938, German Nazis committed a grievous massacre in the streets, killing Jewish people and destroying their property. In response to these events, the Nazi government said that their actions and senseless violence against the Jewish people were “perfectly understandable.”

The name of the holiday refers to the broken glass left in the streets in several countries after the events unfolded. The violence wasn’t limited to just Germany. It also took place in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

It all began on November 7, 1938, when a Nazi German official named Ernst vom Rath was shot in Paris by a Polish Jew who was 17 years old at the time. Ernst vom Rath died two days later after an extremely drummed-up propaganda assault by none other than the Nazi minister of propaganda himself, Joseph Goebbels. He had said that there was a massive conspiracy of Jews behind the assassination.^[4]

Of course, the die-hard Nazi supporters ran with it, committing widespread violence against Jewish people on the night of Ernst vom Rath’s death, which was November 9, 1938. Germany now tries to keep this night burned into their memory with a holiday of remembrance for those who lost their lives on the Night of Broken Glass and all who subsequently died in the tragic events that followed.

That night marked the beginning of much of the anti-Jewish legislation that was railroaded through by the powerful Nazi Party, which legalized the Holocaust and the acts which led to it.

6 Samhain

Samhain is a holiday celebrated by the ancient Celts as a part of their religion before they were subjugated by Roman rule and eventually turned to Christianity (with the help of St. Patrick, no doubt). The Celts were loose-knit tribes known by the Romans as the Gauls. They shared a similar language and culture.

Samhain was the ancient Celtic festival of the dead. Celtic religion held that the spirits of the dead would have to wander the Earth and wait until the day of Samhain, which was November 1, to pass into the afterlife. It didn’t matter what time of year that the person died.

The Celts also believed that their gods were not only mischievous and caused trouble, but that they were also invisible—except on Samhain. During the celebration on October 31, the Celts would leave out burning candles to light the way for their dead so that they could see where they were going.

It should be noted that Samhain isn’t Halloween, though Halloween borrows a lot of Samhain’s traditions. Samhain is actually still practiced by pagans around the world, albeit in smaller numbers.^[5]

In ancient times, it was believed that this period was a time when people could communicate with not only their dead friends and relatives but also the Dark Mother and the Dark Father, entities of supernatural power that the ancient Celts believed in.

Their religion was quite intricate, and this holiday is a time when people would communicate with their darker natures, the darker supernatural, and the dead.

5 Valentine’s Day

Today, the watered-down tradition of St. Valentine’s Day is represented most often by thoughtful cards, chocolates, and romantic love, even courtly love not unlike that of the Middle Ages. And long before the famed St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the brutal Mafia execution of seven men conducted by Al Capone and his gang on February 14, 1929, there was another bloody day that actually spawned Valentine’s Day.

This was the martyrdom of St. Valentine. Yes, Valentine’s Day is the celebration of an execution.

The year was 269, and Claudius II was the emperor of mighty Rome. The growth of marriage and family life had caused a shortage of men willing to leave home and fight in foreign lands. Therefore, Claudius outlawed marriage entirely and anyone caught getting married or performing marriage rites would be condemned.^[6]

But St. Valentine refused to stop performing marriages. He was punished severely for his “crimes” and was eventually tortured, beaten with clubs, and beheaded. Yes, you read that right—St. Valentine’s Day is the celebration of a saint from ancient Rome who was tortured, beheaded, and died on February 14, 269.

4 The Feast Of Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi could be regarded as a particularly strange holiday to those who aren’t Catholic and don’t believe in transubstantiation, the idea that food and wine can turn into the body and blood of Christ for the believer consuming them. The Feast of Corpus Christi is a whole day to drink blood and eat flesh for devout believers.

“Corpus Christi” translates to “the body of Christ” in Latin, so there’s no ambiguity that the idea of eating the flesh of Christ is involved.

Heavy symbolism characterizes this holiday, which began in 1246. With chalices and bread wafers everywhere, it’s an aesthetic experience as much as a spiritual one. For most non-Catholics, a holiday where one places bread into his mouth that actually turns into flesh might raise some eyebrows. But many Catholics all over the world celebrate this holiday annually and have done so for hundreds of years.^[7]

3 Dia De Los Muertos

The reason we can’t appropriately say that Samhain was the forerunner of Halloween is that Samhain became what Catholics celebrate as All Saints’ Day on November 1. All Saints’ Day is basically the Catholic version of Samhain, complete with celebrating those who’ve gone to Heaven and the saints taking the place of the Celtic gods of old.

Dia de los Muertos is a Mexican holiday which celebrates the personification of death itself and has long roots in both European and Aztec cultures. With Spanish conquests of the Aztecs, Dia de los Muertos was moved to line up with the Catholic All Saints’ Day. The two fused into one holiday when practitioners would pay respects to their dead, which was in the origins of both holidays.

Dia de los Muertos makes no claims to be anything other than a dark holiday that’s all about death, with the name itself translating to “Day of the Dead” in Spanish. However, there are some notable differences between All Saints’ Day and Dia de los Muertos.

Santa Muerte (aka Our Lady of Holy Death), the major figure celebrated on Dia de los Muertos, is the saint of death. Dia de los Muertos takes Samhain and All Saints’ Day one step further by actually making death itself a saint. The Catholic Church rejects this saint and warns against the holiday as being dark and even satanic.^[8]

2 Passover

Passover is a Jewish holiday in which practitioners remove all leavened bread from their homes and reenact what life must have been like when the Jews fled Egypt in the Bible. For many, it’s a celebration of the liberation of the Jews from an oppressive Egypt and the foundation of the homeland for the Israelites. The holiday begins on the 15th and runs through the 21st in March or April.

But what’s the real story behind what they were fleeing? Well, it all starts with the slaughter of the firstborn. Exodus 11:5 says:

“Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well.”^[9]

According to the Bible, Jehovah killed every firstborn Egyptian child in the country to prove his point. And it gets worse. This was actually a reprisal because the pharaoh of Egypt had killed all the newborns and infants of the ancient Hebrews to prove his point. Then the 10 plagues of Egypt happened, with everything from raining frogs to bubonic plagues hitting Egypt hard according to the Bible.

This is what the holiday actually celebrates—a religious and military victory over another nation that, if you take it as gospel, is quite barbaric in nature.

1 Christmas

Christmas is both unusual and dark in its history for a few reasons. First, Christmas is an extremely modern holiday. Historically, Christians don’t celebrate birthdays as it has long been viewed as pagan to celebrate an individual’s birth on Earth rather than his dying to go to Heaven in accordance with Christian beliefs.

This is why saints are remembered for their (often macabre) deaths instead of their births because the moment of eternal judgment in Christianity is more important than life. This made Christmas a mockery for a long time, with writers advocating strongly against it. Traditionally, in Christianity, the moment of death was your actual and true “birthday” in the kingdom of God.

The second and more macabre part of the story comes with a jolly old fat guy, Saint Nicholas or Santa Claus. Thanks to Coca-Cola ads stemming from the 1930s, we now see him plastered everywhere as a fat guy with a wispy white beard, a red onesie with white fur trim, and a big grin on his face at all times.

But this isn’t the real Saint Nick, so who was he? Well, the answer is that we don’t really know because we have no surviving historical documentation. He was the bishop of Myra in the fourth century. But aside from that, we know next to nothing about the man.

However, we do have one major artifact: his dead body. Yes, the only thing we know for sure about Saint Nicholas is that we have his actual dead corpse.

Allegedly, the real Saint Nicholas wasn’t very jolly. He was present for the very first Council of Nicaea in 325. There, he punched a guy in the face whom he thought was heretical.^[10]

After he died in 343, his remains lay buried until Italian sailors stole his corpse and moved it in 1087 from Myra to a city in Italy called Bari. Before this, the original Santa Claus was a nobody. But the theft of his remains made his popularity surge in Europe, which is how he became a figure that’s still present in our cultures today.

To put this little piece of history to the test, researchers analyzed a fragment of Santa’s hip bone. Sure enough, it dated all the way back to the fourth century, confirming that it probably belonged to the original Santa Claus.

I love to write about dark stuff, horror-themed material, the unusual, murder, and death. Here’s a twisted little piece about the dark histories of holidays. This isn’t your usual holiday list, and Christmas is definitely the bizarre kicker. I haven’t seen it discussed like this anywhere.

There you are, playing your favorite video game when Grandpa walks in. You know you’re going to get an earful of rant when your avatar rips this chainsaw through the other player.

Don’t worry, my friend. Here is a handy list of some of the most twisted and macabre ways that humans entertained themselves in eras well before Grandpa was even on the Earth. You know, to throw back his way when that rant begins.

10 True Crime

Some of the earliest celebrities were criminals. People would follow the stories of the crimes and the searches for outlaws, murderers, and bank robbers. They would pore over every small detail and hope to see a bloody recreation or photo of the crime scene.

Pat Garrett, the man who brought down Billy the Kid, even had to write and publish his own account of what happened after the outcry of people who bought up the 15 dime novels that were published about this Old West outlaw. Garrett had to remind people that Billy was a thief and a murderer.^[1]

The ambush site of Bonnie and Clyde became a chaotic circus of true crime fanatics when the couple was killed. One woman got away with locks of Bonnie’s hair to sell later, while another man was chased away for trying to cut off Clyde’s trigger finger.

The coroner overseeing the site said:

Nearly everyone had begun collecting souvenirs such as shell casings, slivers of glass from the shattered car windows, and bloody pieces of clothing from the garments of Bonnie and Clyde. One eager man had opened his pocket knife and was reaching into the car to cut off Clyde’s left ear.

Compared to that, listening to a podcast doesn’t sound so bad.

9 Le Grand Guignol

In 1897, Oscar Metenier opened his theater, Le Grand Guignol. While the theater was considered controversial for employing prostitutes, criminals, and other dregs of society, Metenier and his partner, Andre Antoine, told the authorities to hold their beers. The Guignol became famous for ramping up the controversy by adding scenes of extreme violence and gore into their plays.

Plays like Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations and Le Baiser dans la Nuit drew in crowds averaging 250, including celebrities and royalty, with their scenes of bloody horror, dismemberment, and perversion.

One play involved a doctor who finds the man that’s sleeping with his wife on his operating table. Another play dealt with how a man gets revenge on the woman who disfigured him with acid.^[2]

The Guignol’s scenes didn’t shy away, either! One famous scene showed a man strangling a woman to death before cutting her arm off, only to discover that she wasn’t truly dead yet. All this in full view of the audience.

The Guignol continued shows until 1962 when the audience diminished and it was forced to close. While the director at the time blamed World War II, many people placed blame on his decision to cut back on the gore.

8 Dark Rides

If you look up “dark rides” today, you’ll get a list of fairly tame themed rides centered around cartoon mice, innovative technology, and carnival fun. If you dig just a little deeper, though, you’ll see the era when horror ruled these rides.

Step outside the major parks and head down to the state fairs and carnivals to see that more than half of these dark rides have themes that deal with mad doctors, demonic entities, ghost houses, dragons, and many other creepy monsters and madmen.

The Pretzel Amusement Ride Company became famous toward the end of the 19th century for making tracks for dark rides. Although the company made the track, it was up to their customer to create the theme of the ride.

Most carnival owners found that rides that could give the rider a good scare really drew in the dollars. This ramped up during the 1970s and 1980s when slasher films and horror movies were at the peak of popularity. They had become so popular that famed artist H.R. Giger owned and designed a dark ride for his personal use.

Dark rides are still in use today and have a massive fan base that is pulling for the preservation of these rides. Because we should all, at least once in our lives, ride a rickety cart into a dark room run by carnies.^[3]

7 Slum Tourism

Do you ever think to yourself, “Man, I really need to put my millions of dollars, posh house, and hundreds of sports cars into perspective?” No? Neither do we. Apparently, people with these things do have that thought run through their minds on occasion. Just ask the people who work in the slum tourism industry.

In 1884, a trend began where the rich were willing to pay high dollars to take guided tours of poor areas of cities. Towns like White Chapel in London, Five Points in Manhattan, and Mumbai in India became very popular spots to take these tours.

While it was sold to the public as a means of showing the upper class how badly the lower class needed help, it soon became apparent that it was nothing more than a chance for the rich to scratch an itch for the morbid.

Surely, this isn’t something that still happens today. Well . . . about that. Even though people are fighting hard against this industry, you can still book tours of areas like Mumbai, Dharavi, Charleroi, South Central LA, 8 Mile, Belfast, South Africa, The Bronx, and most disaster areas.^[4]

Kennedy Odede from Kenya once wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “They get photos; we lose a piece of our dignity.” Indeed.

6 Dime Museums

While originally billed as “edutainment to help the working class to understand the world around them,” dime museums were actually the chance for the lower classes to afford a bit of dark entertainment. While museums for the upper middle class were what you think of when you hear of a museum today, dime museums were essentially carnival sideshows that stayed in one centralized location as opposed to traveling.

At dime museums, you could see freak shows, “Fee Gee mermaids,” and other mounted displays. Their vaudeville acts helped to start the careers of Harry Houdini, Maggie Cline, and others.

While the popularity of dime museums reached their peak around the turn of the century, many still exist across the US. These include the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, the Museum of Death in Los Angeles, and the Monroe Moosnick Museum in Lexington, Kentucky.^[5]

5 Cemetery Picnics

While everything else on this list can be seen as a glorious obsession with morbidity and death, cemetery picnics can actually be seen as the most wholesome and cheerful of the lot.

As we’ve seen before, the beginning of the 19th century was a time when people were desperate to get out and do anything to break the mundanity of daily life. Going to tend to grandma’s final resting place would do just that. Why not make a day of it?

At the time, cemeteries were beautiful areas of town that were well maintained. Considering that public parks weren’t a thing yet and human mortality was closer to the front of the mind than it is now, cemeteries were the places to enjoy the outside while you were still alive.^[6]

A lot of cemeteries actually have rules against having picnics because of the solemn nature of graveyards now.

4 Asylum Tourism

While it could be lumped into the same category as the slum tourism that was mentioned earlier, asylum tourism actually evolved to be a bit more of a positive thing.

In the 1800s, it was common for tourism pamphlets to make mention of seeing the local asylum. These tours originally were intended to take advantage of the public’s need to see the darker side of the world.

By the 1900s, however, they were more a display of the evolution of medical and mental treatments. The stops on the tour were no longer about simply gawking at the insane and the debilitated. Instead, they started showing the steps that the hospitals were taking to cure their patients.

Some facilities discouraged the tours as an excuse for the public to come and see the insane or even as a distraction for the nursing staff from their regular duties. Others insisted on the tours as a way to show the public the reality of mental illness, educate people in the methods of treatment, try to end the stigmas that came with mental illness, and gain the confidence of the public in the hospital.^[7]

3 Witch Hunts

Witch hunts have been around since humanity has needed to blame the ills of the world on anything at all. While witchcraft was seen as just another death-worthy offense through the Middle Ages, witch trials didn’t become an exclusive form of dark entertainment until the 16th century.

With the fear of disease and misfortune, the competition between the Protestant Church and the Catholic Church to gain followers, and the rising tide of “witch hunters” such as Matthew Hopkins, witch trials soon began drawing the curiosity of the public.

Hopkins and his lot found a means of making a good living by going from town to town, whipping the fear of the unknown into a frenzy, and then making a massive spectacle of the trials of people who were simply scapegoats. Not long after, the American colonies began to have their own witch hunts that drew entire towns to the courthouse to witness these spectacles.^[8]

People would gather under the excuse of “civic duty” to see the accused cast spells and the witnesses writhe in faux agony. There was even a small possibility of glimpsing some skin while they were looking for the “devil’s mark.”

It was truly a manic circus that had to be seen to be believed. Thousands of innocent individuals died during the 16th and 17th centuries simply because other people were bored and scared.

2 Dogfighting

Dogfighting can be traced back to the Roman invasion of Britain. When the Romans saw just how vicious Britain’s war dogs could be, they began importing the animals for use in betting events.

In the 12th century, baiting became a regular form of entertainment for nobility in England. Baiting is when a dog is released on a larger animal that may be tied or chained to the floor. Dog fighting, rooster fighting, and other animal fight “sports” had become a worldwide phenomenon.

By the 1860s, most states in the US had outlawed dogfighting once it was recognized as the inhumane act that it is. Other regions of the world started to enact laws against dogfighting soon after.^[9]

Still, dogfighting is a major problem worldwide. Some nations—such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia, China, Albania, and many prefectures of Japan—even allow dogfighting as a form of entertainment. Even the countries that have banned dog and animal fighting have to stage regular raids to arrest dogfight promoters and patrons.

1 Public Executions

It’s difficult to establish the beginning of public executions, but it’s a widely held belief that they started as a means of showing governmental control over their people. It wound up becoming an almost carnival-like environment.^[10]

In Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, author Frances Larson said:

For as long as there were public executions, there were crowds to see them. In London in the early 19th century, there might have been 5,000 to watch a standard hanging, but crowds of up to 100,000 came to see a famous felon killed. The numbers hardly changed over the years. An estimated 20,000 watched Rainey Bethea hang in 1936, in what turned out to be the last public execution in the US.

People would gather in the town square to hear the condemned speak their last words, buy a snack from a vendor, laugh at the sideshows, and just enjoy the spectacle of gathering together to watch someone die.

While most nations have shied away from the practice, many countries staged public executions as late as 2012, according to Amnesty International. The final public execution in France was in 1939.

Serial killer Eugen Weidmann was executed by guillotine in front of several hundred spectators, including a 17-year-old Christopher Lee. The governor had decided that this would be the last public execution because of the throngs of people who mobbed the scene to get souvenirs.

Lee Drake is a writer and 3-D artist who currently lives in Orlando, Florida. He also hosts a vlog on horror, haunted attractions, and other scary things over on Youtube.

The dancing plague, also referred to as a dancing mania, is reported to have happened throughout parts of Western Europe. It affected people from the 14th to the 17th century. The most notable incident of this plague occurred in the summer of 1518 in Strasbourg, France, where people would drop dead from exhaustion.

10The Case Of Frau Troffea

A week before the festival of Mary Magdalene in 1518, Frau Troffea stepped out of her home and started to dance. Her legs took her this way and that. She danced all day and into the evening until she collapsed.

Muscles twitching and full of sweat, she slept for a few hours before waking and starting her bizarre dance all over again. On the third day of her dance, her shoes were soaked with blood She was exhausted, but there was no rest for her weary body.

Onlookers watched until, days later, Frau Troffea was taken to a shrine to be healed of her affliction, but it was too late. Other people had been compelled to dance in the streets. Thirty dancers quickly climbed to over 400 people who danced until their feet were raw or they died.

9Cause Unknown

As more and more people went into the streets during the month of August, their legs jerking in a kind of macabre dance, the people of the city became frightened. The dancers appeared to be mad, and onlookers debated who was to blame: God or the devil. By the time there were hundreds of people dancing in the streets, bloody, sweaty, and beyond exhausted. It is estimated that as many as 15 people were dying from the dancing plague each day.

What was the underlying cause of the dancing plague? Could it have been mass hysteria or was it an actual plague caused by a virus? To this day, no one knows what caused the dancing plague in Strasbourg and in other parts of Western Europe, but there are plenty of opinions on what may have happened.

8Paracelsus’s Opinion

Paracelsus, physician and alchemist, visited Strasbourg in 1526, just a few years after the dancing plague incident. He became the first to write about Frau Troffea, and he was the first to use the term “choreomania” to describe the dancing sickness.

Paracelsus had his own opinion on the cause of the dancing plague. It turned out that Frau Troffea’s husband absolutely hated it when she would dance. Paracelsus and some of the people of Strasbourg believed that she started her dance simply to annoy her husband.

Paracelsus broke down the dancing sickness into three causes. First, it was born out of the imagination. Second, people may have joined in the dance out of sexual frustration. Finally, there may have been bodily causes for some of the people who exhibited uncontrolled dancing. Ultimately, Paracelsus felt that unhappy wives were the main cause of the dancing plague.

7Societal Stress

One of the more probable causes of the dancing plague was stress. The dancing plague arrived on the heels of the Black Death. It appeared as though those affected were having involuntary leg contractions, something still seen in a small portion of psychiatric patients today, although to a lesser extent.

The stress may have been caused by spiritual guilt with the sufferer believing that he or she was being punished by God for various sins. There was also a lot of tension between society’s classes during this time. Top that off with poverty and hunger, and you have groups of people who are bound to break under the strain.

6Tarantula Bites

France was not the only country affected by the dancing plague. Italy also had outbreaks of the dance mania, but there, they called it tarantism. The people believed that the spontaneous dancing was brought on by tarantula bites. Those who were bitten would twitch and dance. It was said that they seemed drawn to the sea and that many died by throwing themselves into the cold depths of the water.

Even though the tarantula bite is not poisonous to humans, the last known case of tarantism in Italy was investigated in 1959.

5The Binding Cure

Different methods were used to try to cure those affected with the dancing mania. One of the more common methods involved binding.

Victims of the sickness were bound in cloths, similar to the way we wrap babies in a swaddling clothes. This prevented the victims from dancing themselves bloody.

Some of the victims also claimed that tightness around the stomach helped relieve them from the madness. A few requested to be punched or stomped on the stomach for relief.

4Darkness And Fasting

Paracelsus recommended his own cure for the dancing disease. He labeled the sufferers as “whores and scoundrels” and felt that they should be treated as awfully as he named them.

First, he insisted that they should be locked up in a dark room. The more unpleasant the room, the better. Second, the victims should fast and only be allowed bread and water.

No word is given on whether the cruel treatment worked or not, but it could not have been any worse than the exorcisms performed by the church on victims of the dance mania.

3Children’s Dancing Plague

Records show that in 1237, a large number of children were affected with the dancing plague in Erfurt, Germany. About 100 children started to dance uncontrollably. They danced all the way to Arnstadt and then collapsed from exhaustion.

The children were gathered up and were returned to their parents. Some of the children died shortly thereafter, and it is said that the rest lived out their days with a tremor that would not go away.

No one knows what caused the outbreak.

2Saint John’s Dance

A dance mania overtook Germany in the 1300s, immediately after the Black Death. Men and women took to the streets and convulsively danced, to everyone’s horror. They would leap about, foaming at the mouth, and appeared to be possessed.

The mania spread from one person to another. Some of the victims were swaddled, and they recovered for a short time only to fall into the mania once again.

Victims claimed that during the dancing fits, they were clueless to their surroundings. They heard nothing, saw nothing, but were compelled to move about, screaming and dancing, until they would pass out from total exhaustion.

1Saint Vitus’s Dance

Saint Vitus’s Dance is often lumped in with the dance manias, but it was not a true dance. While Saint Vitus was the patron saint of dancers, those affected with Saint Vitus’s Dance had a disease that caused their bodies to twitch or jerk. Now known as Sydenham’s chorea those who had the disease were taken to the Chapel of St. Vitus in the hopes that they would be cured.

The Catholic church insisted that those infected with Saint Vitus’s Dance visit the chapel. Anyone who refused to undertake the journey was excommunicated.

Elizabeth spends most of her time surrounded by dusty, smelly, old books in a room she refers to as her personal nirvana. She’s been writing about strange stuff since 1997 and enjoys traveling to historical places.

In the blink of an eye, technology has taken us from prey to predator and from caves to the cosmos. It’s moved so fast that parent and child no longer live the same life, and it’s only getting faster. Every day technology grows and mutates.

Some futurologists see a technological utopia in our future while some predict catastrophe. All of them agree, however, that things are changing more rapidly and dramatically than they ever have before. It’s about to get really weird on Earth.

From digital beings to computers in the air, from mind control to the end of death, this list gathers ten of the more twisted predictions about the future of technology.

Related: 10 More Incredible Ways Nature Beat Us In Technology

10 Forced Neurohacking

Neurohacking is the process of interfacing with and improving the human mind. At the moment, it ranges from simple at-home attempts at cognitive improvement like nootropic supplements all the way to large-scale studies of brain-machine interface. Many labs across the world have already designed machines that are controlled solely by human thought, and so one question poses itself: can they also design machines to work in reverse and control human thought?

The surprising answer is: almost certainly yes. Some labs have decoded the brain’s electrical activity enough to allow otherwise non-communicative people to “speak” through machines, and our brain’s electricity is not some special variation; if understood well enough, it can be manipulated right back. Though one obvious end result of forced neurohacking is zombie-like slaves, one more realistic and likely imminent effect could be neuro-marketing, by which our devices could actively emit signals that alter our brainwaves to want one product or another.

9 Designer Humans

This topic has generated a lot of press in recent years. As our understanding of the genetic basis for human abilities and disabilities improves, scientists and lawmakers are becoming forced to ask the question: is it appropriate to edit people’s genes before they’re born? That’s the central premise of designer humans, and its implications are as numerous as they are frightening.

On the one hand, designer humans could mean an end to most congenital diseases, including cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s, heart disease, and many cancers. This could easily then extend to common genetic annoyances like poor eyesight and baldness. But the unsettling implications remain. Who will have access to this technology? Who won’t? Will we allow designer humans to compete in sports against non-designed? Will and should we go farther than prevention and alter genes to make us smarter, faster, and stronger? Will there be tiers of different designer humans? Is any of it ethical in the first place?

8 Every Atom a Computer

Moore’s law is a commonly cited prediction about the future of technology that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double about every two years. More broadly, Moore’s law states that computers will become faster and more efficient even as they become smaller. Many futurists predict that this trend will continue until we create what is known as zero-size intelligence, a computer more powerful than any ever built and yet with almost (or even literally) zero mass.

This could lead to any number of utopian or dystopian scenarios, as with enough time, energy, and resources, potentially every atom around us could become a supercomputer. One natural fear is the artificial intelligence singularity, as fighting armies of atom-sized supercomputers in our air does not sound fun. Another, perhaps more likely fear, is that the machines don’t become self-aware and rise up but rather stay under human control. This leads us to…

7 Smart Dust

Smart dust. A term first coined by physicist Kris Pister in 1990. Smart dust refers to clouds of nano-robots that would be able to generate an unparalleled amount of data with an equally unparalleled amount of secrecy. Essentially, the very air around us could become swarms of nano-bots that relay our every action and thought to whomever they serve.

This needn’t wait until we reach zero-size intelligence, however. Computers as large as insects could swarm around us even now, drawing little to no attention, recording our every movement.

6 The Coding Olympics

Predictions about the future of technology tend to focus on end-of-the-world and redefined-humanity scenarios, but what will happen to the day-to-day, fun parts of life? Sports, for example, have been a topic of discussion for futurists recently, and most think they’ll be very different in the near future.

Robots already exist which can sink basketball shots, kick field goals, and run laps. Though they may end up replacing human athletes, some futurists predict an even weirder change. Inventor and futurist Dean Kamen notes that the original Olympic games were created around skills useful to that time period, like chariot racing and wrestling. Future Olympics could then hold contests relevant to their own time period, like coding, wiring, and physical calculations.

5 Second Life

Popularized by movies like The Matrix, the idea of a simulated reality is one of the most common predictions of humanity’s future. In The Matrix, humans are farmed as resources and kept docile with the simulated reality. In the real world, however, humanity might willfully retreat into a simulated world simply to escape the ever-deteriorating “real” Earth.

Even without the scary spider-machines forcing us into the illusion, the idea of a complete retreat from reality is frightening. The new digital reality could be created using entirely different rules than we’re used to. Even worse, whoever designs it could imbue it with shortcuts and cheats known only to themselves or a chosen few. In a universe completely created by the few, inequality could reach unimaginable new heights(/lows).

4 The Dead Will Walk

The concept of replicating human consciousness into a digital avatar raises another twisted concept: anyone could be stored forever, and so death would come to mean little. So-called “dead” consciousnesses could be stored in video portraits, a la the Harry Potter universe’s magically interactive portraits.

They could also be stored in lifelike robots, and if the robots become lifelike enough, death would mean essentially nothing, just a quick hop from one body to another. Eventually, the robots containing uploaded consciousnesses could replace biologically-born consciousnesses and, if their bodies were durable enough, functionally end the cycle of birth and death.

3 No More Sky as We Know It

This prediction is actually two different predictions, and both are almost guaranteed to come true. First, the blue sky of our atmosphere will begin to vanish as more and more drones, and potentially personal flying machines, fill the skies. Second, the blackness of space at night will begin to shine and glow as our planet begins to be orbited by more and more—and larger and larger—satellites.

As drones begin to dominate industries like home delivery and long-range tracking, and as satellites likewise begin to establish competing networks of communication and defense, our skies as we know them will disappear. Though at first, that will mean only the occasional speck in the otherwise clear sky, eventually every square mile of the sky could end up as crowded as your average metropolitan street.

2 No More Animals as We Know Them

Currently, the human-led Anthropocene Extinction Event is causing millions of species on Earth to go extinct at a rate hundreds to thousands of times faster than the natural background rate. It’s entirely possible that the near future may be free of wild animals and plants completely. Perhaps the most logical species to prioritize saving over the rest are those that produce food and materials, but already, lab-grown substitutes have hit mass markets as alternatives.

That leaves a world with little to no non-microbial life and little practical, economic reason to regenerate it. This may remind some of the world depicted in Blade Runner, in which animals (like the replicants) are biological entities designed from the ground up, and with good reason; that is entirely possible. After the extinction of the original species, designer animals may be the new norm. And as microbe farms would sustainably produce food, the only purpose those animals may serve would be entertainment for the wealthy and bored.

1 No More Technology as We Know It

Technology is usually thought of as mechanical and electronic, and likewise, technological advancements are thought of as advances in computing and data transfer. In reality, the future of technology may be more biological in nature. Perhaps even completely so.

Traditional manufacturing has proven disastrous to our planet, and alternative processes to generate materials like plastics and fuels are already starting to gain widespread use. Microbes, in particular, are proving useful in generating materials, fuels, and even sustainable food. A natural solution to traditional manufacturing, as well as a natural synthesis of the designer human, designer animal, and microbe materials concepts, is to replace electronic machines with biological machines. Many futurists imagine a human society wherein our food, homes, and even vehicles are entirely grown by designer microbes and perhaps even living entities themselves.

It seems obvious that a former president should be given an appropriate and honorable final resting place. For most who have served their country, that has been true. But there have also been a surprising number of issues with former leaders’ deaths. From George Washington to the present day, presidents have been memorialized in some strange ways. Worse still, some of their remains haven’t been allowed to rest as they should.

Here are ten tales of the strange fates of former presidents after death.

Related: Top 10 Faux Pas Committed By US Presidents

10 George Washington

When George Washington died in 1799, his will was clear: He wanted to be buried close to his Virginia home. But the mausoleum at his plantation, Mount Vernon, needed considerable renovation to hold the first President’s remains. Prior to his death, Washington himself laid out the issue. He wrote about repairs that had to be done to the vault: “I desire that a new [tomb] of Brick, and upon a larger Scale, may be built at the foot of what is commonly called the Vineyard Inclosure… In which my remains, with those of my deceased relatives… may be deposited.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Congress ignored his request and conspired to erect a crypt in the U.S. Capitol building. But by 1830, three decades after Washington’s death, that memorial hadn’t been built. Washington’s remains were still in Mount Vernon—but no renovation had been done on the vault there, either.

That’s when things got strange. That year, Washington’s nephew and last surviving heir, John Augustine Washington II, fired a gardener who had been employed at Mount Vernon. The landscaper was upset about the dismissal and sought revenge. He crept into the crypt with the intention of stealing the late president’s skull. Thankfully, Washington’s body had been encased in lead to prevent post-death tampering. Even so, the crypt was in such bad shape that the bones of dozens of people were scattered and mixed together inside. Instead of taking a piece of Washington, the gardener swiped the skull of one of his distant relatives. A year later, the surviving Washington heir erected a new crypt to honor the president, and—pardon the pun—the rest is history.^[1]

9 James K. Polk

James K. Polk died only a few months after his term ended in 1849. The nation’s 11th President died of cholera, which at the time meant a quick burial in a mass grave to slow the disease’s aggressive spread. That burial was unbecoming for a former president, though. After a year in a common grave in a city cemetery in Nashville, lawmakers in Tennessee ordered the remains moved. The intended final resting spot was to be Polk Place, where the president died. And for a while, that was that. But in 1893, the Polk family sold the expansive property. When that happened, Tennessee officials moved Polk’s remains to the State Capitol in Nashville—and again, for a while, that was that.

In 2017, Polk’s final resting place came back into question. At issue this time was the late president’s last will and testament. In the document, he requested to be buried at Polk Place. That property was demolished not long after his family sold it back in 1893, though. So state lawmakers began the process of moving the remains to a property in the city of Columbia, an hour outside Nashville.

Polk had also owned that home during his life, and politicians reasoned the move would essentially fulfill the request in his will. In 2018, the Tennessee legislature passed a resolution to move Polk yet again. However, six months later, it was put on hold when the Tennessee Historical Commission refused to grant permission to disturb the remains. Today, Polk rests at the State Capitol Building—for now.^[2]

8 Zachary Taylor

Not long after Polk’s death, his successor died. Zachary Taylor had the unfortunate distinction of dying in office when he perished a year into his term in 1850. He was 65 years old upon death, which was an advanced age at the time. However, just days before passing, he was in good spirits at a Fourth of July ceremony. The sudden death left supporters wondering if he was poisoned. Taylor had been strongly against allowing slavery in the west at the time. Thus, his supporters wondered whether pro-slavery insurgents poisoned the milk and cherries he ate on the Fourth of July. But no definitive proof of poisoning was ever revealed.

Taylor was buried in his home state of Kentucky. For a while, he rested peacefully. But over the next century, the possibility of poisoning continued to be debated. In 1991, the former President was exhumed for an autopsy. Kentucky’s chief medical examiner performed the procedure. He conclusively found Taylor had not been poisoned. In his report, the death doc wrote Taylor died of “a myriad of natural diseases which could have produced the symptoms of gastroenteritis.” Satisfied at the conclusion, 140 years later, lawmakers had Taylor reburied. Today, he rests in the National Cemetery that bears his name in Louisville.^[3]

7 John Tyler

John Tyler was America’s tenth President, serving before Polk. The Southerner died in 1862, during the middle of the Civil War. He had been elected to the insurgent Confederacy’s legislature in his final days. Thus, rebels held the Virginia native’s body on their side of the horrifically bloody war. This riled up men on both fronts of the conflict and altered how Tyler’s final resting place was designated. The write-up of Tyler’s passing in The New York Times was vicious, asserting he went “down to death amid the ruins of his native State.” The obituary continued: “[Tyler] himself was one of the architects of its ruin; and beneath that melancholy wreck his name will be buried, instead of being inscribed on the Capitol’s monumental marble, as a year ago he so much desired.”

That obituary writer would be proven correct. Tyler had requested a simple funeral at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virgina. That did not happen. Seeing an opportunity to promote rebel pride, Confederate President Jefferson Davis threw a “grand event” for Tyler. Davis even draped Tyler’s coffin in a Confederate flag. In response, Union lawmakers refused to acknowledge the former president’s resting place. Today, Tyler is still interred in Richmond. The old bitterness has carried on, too. According to cemetery officials, he is still the only former president whose resting place is not recognized in Washington.^[4]

6 Abraham Lincoln

After Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, his body was taken by train around the country. Millions of Americans mourned their murdered leader. The body was embalmed for the trip—a relatively new procedure at the time. It hadn’t been perfected yet, though. The 19-day rail journey required morticians to travel with Lincoln’s corpse and re-embalm it at every stop. However, the experts were unable to prevent the corpse’s ultimate decay. When the train stopped in New York, a reporter wrote: “It will not be possible, despite the effection of the embalming, to continue much longer the exhibition, as the constant shaking of the body aided by the exposure to the air, and the increasing of dust, has already undone much of the… workmanship.” Thankfully, after three weeks, Lincoln was finally laid to rest in an Illinois tomb.

A decade later, in 1876, a group of criminals devised a plan to steal Lincoln’s remains and hold them for ransom. There were no guards at the late president’s tomb, and the marble sarcophagus serving as his resting place had only been lightly sealed. Unbeknownst to the group, they revealed their scheme to a man who was a government informant. He told the Secret Service, and on the day the crew went to the tomb, officers were waiting. Following that near-theft, Lincoln’s remains were secretly buried in the vault’s basement. In 1901, he was disinterred once more and reburied inside a steel cage under ten feet of concrete.^[5]

5 Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding suddenly died at a San Francisco hotel in 1923. At the time, he was in the midst of a nationwide speaking tour. He’d also recently suffered food poisoning. But nobody expected him to pass without warning. His wife, Florence, was adamant about the aftermath: no autopsy and immediate embalming. Harding’s doctors were furious. They wanted to know what had suddenly killed the sitting President. One frustrated medical professional even wrote: “We shall never know exactly the immediate cause of President Harding’s death since every effort that was made to secure an autopsy met with complete and final refusal.” The grieving widow was unmoved, though, and her late husband was buried.

For a while, the public blamed Harding’s doctors for his death. But a few years later, the truth started to come out. In 1928, a woman named Nan Britton wrote a tell-all book about an alleged affair she had with Harding. And in 1930, a former administration staffer wrote a book alleging Florence poisoned her husband after learning of the infidelity. Then, almost a century later, Britton’s descendants wanted answers about their lineage. Ancestry documentation linked them to Harding, and they took the late president’s offspring to court over it. Before Harding’s body could be exhumed for DNA proof, though, his progeny relented. They admitted Harding did indeed have an affair with Britton that produced a child.^[6]

4 Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of America’s greatest presidents. He saw the country through a bit more than three terms spanning much of the Great Depression and World War II. When he died in 1945, he had been very sick for a very long time. Still, his death was not expected. Roosevelt had been at one of his vacation homes with an alleged mistress when he perished. He told her he felt “a terrific pain in the back of my head” and passed out. Three hours later, he was dead. But while officials knew the importance of embalming quickly after death, their response was slow. An undertaker wasn’t contacted until four hours after the president’s death. All the while, aides waited on Eleanor Roosevelt to arrive as the next of kin.

Nine hours later, the embalming process finally began. The undertaker, F. Haden Snoderly, recorded a detailed 15-page memo about the significant issues he faced at that point. “Rigor mortis had set in,” he wrote, and Roosevelt’s abdomen had been “noticeably distended” by the time embalming began. Worse still, FDR’s “arteries were sclerotic,” which meant it was nearly impossible for Snoderly to get embalming fluid into the great man’s veins. The process was so difficult that accusations later appeared in books that Roosevelt had been poisoned and his body had turned black upon death. Those claims were false, but rumors persisted. As for FDR’s afterlife, the president wanted to keep things simple. He wrote out a very detailed set of instructions demanding a bare-bones coffin, a low-key funeral, and no lying in state.^[7]

3 John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy’s body rests in the Arlington National Cemetery. His brain, however, is missing. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. During the autopsy, his brain was placed in “a stainless-steel container with a screw-top lid.” Secret Service agents stored it in a secured file cabinet for safekeeping. From there, it was later brought to a “secure room” within the National Archives. But then something horrible happened. Three years after Kennedy’s death, officials discovered the late President’s brain had vanished. But nobody knew when or how it had been removed from the National Archives.

Author James Swanson reported on the macabre caper in the book End Of Days, writing: “the brain, the tissue slides, and other autopsy materials were missing—and they have never been seen since.” There is no shortage of conspiracy theories focused on Kennedy’s death, but his missing brain has only added to the lore. Swanson played right into it with his own theory too. The author claimed JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was the one who swiped the organ. “My conclusion is that Robert Kennedy did take his brother’s brain—not to conceal evidence of a conspiracy but perhaps to conceal evidence of the true extent of President Kennedy’s illnesses,” Swanson wrote, “or perhaps to conceal evidence of the number of medications that President Kennedy was taking.”^[8]

2 Tassos Papadopoulos

Tassos Papadopoulos, the former President of Cyprus, succumbed to lung cancer in 2008. Papadopoulos had been a political hero in the island nation. After his death, his body was interred in a cemetery in the city of Nicosia. But on the day before the first anniversary of his passing, the remains were stolen. On the morning of December 11, 2009, one of Papadopoulos’s former bodyguards went to the gravesite to light a candle of remembrance. It had rained hard the night before. When the mourning man arrived, he found an empty hole and a pile of dirt where the grave had been. The shocked man immediately called the police.

Officials were baffled by the heist. For weeks, they failed to determine any suspects. Then, three months later, an anonymous tip led police to a different cemetery in Nicosia. There, they found Papadopoulos’s body reburied in another grave. The tip gave investigators a lead, too. It turned out the late president’s body had been dug up by a man seeking leverage to ask for his brother’s release from prison. The scheme came apart after another accomplice called Papadopolous’s family and asked for money instead. The grave robbers were caught and quickly punished. Each man received less than two years in jail for the crime. Thankfully, Papadopoulos was reburied peacefully.^[9]

1 José Eduardo dos Santos

When José Eduardo dos Santos died in early July 2022, it kicked off a series of tense exchanges. Dos Santos had ruled over Angola for decades after taking power in 1979. During that time, his regime oversaw a brutal civil war. He died in Spain, thousands of miles away from his political opponents. But the geography and timing were both tough: Angola was on the eve of an already-tense election campaign when dos Santos succumbed in Barcelona.

His daughter openly claimed foul play had felled the 79-year-old man. She demanded an autopsy in Spain to determine his cause of death. The autopsy was performed, but the evidence of misdeed was not there. Certain of an unsuspicious death, a Spanish judge ruled weeks later that dos Santos was not the victim of foul play. The judge also ordered dos Santos’s body be released to his widow, Ana Paula, and not his children. The grieving wife flew it back to his homeland days before the August elections.

The current Angolan government protested that choice but eventually allowed it. Longtime supporters met the late president’s casket at the airport in Luanda and mourned as it traveled through the city. Finally, in August, dos Santos was laid to rest in the capital “after a long waiting period.”^[10]