Ah, ketchup—that wonderful and delicious condiment that Americans love. We love it so much that, on average, we consume about three bottles per year, with kids and teens gobbling the most. Thirsty and want to break a world record? Drink a bottle very quickly. The fastest time to drink a 120-milliliter (4 oz) bottle of ketchup is 32.37 seconds. German TV reporter Benedikt Weber drank it through a straw February 17, 2012 at Chong’s Diner in Nuremberg.

The condiment can be an obsession and is certainly the source of some very unusual facts.

10Early Versions Did Not Use Tomatoes

Though ketchup today uses tomato as a base, early versions did not. They were made from anchovies, shallots, oysters, lemons, or walnuts.

Perhaps you find walnut ketchup a tough nut to swallow or find shallots and oysters too fishy. Other people from long ago shared similar thoughts, so back then, mushrooms were the most popular type. A typical mushroom-based recipe is found in Beeton’s Book of Household Management, first published in 1861. Beeton’s mushroom ketchup calls for a peck of mushrooms, salt, pepper, mace, allspice, and a few drops of brandy.

Don’t want to coat your meals with a condiment made from fungi? Try the Philippines version; it uses bananas, so this ketchup tastes sweeter. If you find the thought of brown or yellow ketchup too strange to stomach, don’t worry. Out of deference to tradition, most products on the market are dyed red.

If ketchup made from bananas doesn’t give you a warm and fuzzy feeling either, there are other fruit or vegetable versions. Try plum, pear, sweet mustard, cranberry, carrot, mango, apple, or horseradish ketchup, for starters.

9Five Different Tastes

Most people are familiar with four basic food flavors: sweet, sour, bitter, and salty. A fifth—umami or savory—is also a recognized flavor. It’s a meaty taste and can be added to foods through flavorings such as monosodium glutamate and soy sauce. It was discovered by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda and is found naturally in products such as ripe tomatoes, fish, and cured meat.

The earliest versions of ketchup used only two basic flavors, combining the salty and the bitter. Today’s recipes use five of them, courtesy of H.J. Heinz, founder of the eponymous Heinz company. While some recipes already called for vinegar and sometimes sugar, Heinz increased the amounts used, adding a sour taste and extra sweetness. He also insisted on only using ripe tomatoes, thereby ensuring umami.

Most of the world’s ketchup is currently produced by Heinz, Hunt, and Del Monte, with Heinz the top brand worldwide. It is the third-best-selling condiment in the US, topped only by mayonnaise and salsa, perhaps because it helps satisfy our sweet tooth and carnivorous cravings simultaneously.

8Originally A Cooking Ingredient

Ketchup is now primarily a condiment, but this was not always the case. It once was mainly an ingredient in foods like pies and in more complex sauces, and it was used to flavor fish, meat, and poultry while they were still being cooked. Housewives needing to make gravy with the necks, gizzards, feet, and livers of fowls could add a teaspoonful of mushroom ketchup for flavoring. Likewise, they had the option of using two spoonfuls of mushroom ketchup to help make hare hash and ox-cheek soup. The sauce became primarily a condiment in the 1900s, with the advent of hot dogs, french fries, and hamburgers.

Modern spices and flavorings have gone well beyond the vision of pioneering giant H.J. Heinz. Epicures with adventurous palates can pour beer-flavored ketchup onto their poached eggs and onion-flavored ketchup over their Angus burgers. Other gourmet flavors include cheese, apple cider vinegar, and jalapeño. These variants emphasize one or more parts of the five basic tastes, such as sourness or umani.

7The Ketchup Cure

Need to remove noxious content from your body by emptying bile from your liver into your intestines? If you buy into this 19th-century concept, consider curing yourself with ketchup.

Ketchup was considered to be a medicine around 1835 and was sold as tomato pills. The idea came from Dr. John Cook Bennett, the president of the medical department at Willoughby University in Ohio. He thought that tomatoes could cure illnesses such as diarrhea, jaundice, and indigestion. Bennett took these ideas directly from Dr. William Smith, a physician who lived in Michigan.

Bennett approached Archibald Miles, who at the time was selling his “American Hygiene Pill” patent medicine, convincing him to market “Dr. Mill’s Compound Extract of Tomato.” Researchers debate whether the first version simply used the original hygiene pills, but later versions did contain tomatoes. Miles’s success sparked numerous imitators, leading to even wilder claims of cures for rheumatism, the flu, headaches, and more.

Many of the ketchup pills were fraudulent. Not only did they use no tomatoes—they were actually laxatives. This caused the tomato pill market to collapse in 1840. Most people who wanted to treat their sinuses for a cold did not like treating their colons to thorough cleansings instead.

6Ketchup Helps Prevent Cancer

Despite using questionable science, Bennett and Smith were right: Ketchup does indeed possess health benefits. It’s good for the heart and helps reduce the risk of certain types of cancer. These benefits occur because ketchup is an excellent source of the chemical lycopene, which gives tomatoes its red color. Lycopene is an antioxidant, inhibiting inflammation and cell damage caused by free radicals. Uncooked tomato products such as juice are not as useful as ketchup because the body absorbs cooked tomato products better. Cooked products also have higher lycopene levels.

For prostate cancer, research shows that lycopene reduces the growth of cancerous cells and also affects the way these cells communicate. It chokes the way blood flows to these cells by inhibiting the growth of blood vessels that feed tumors. Some studies indicate that lycopene also helps with liver, skin, breast, and lung cancer, but the results are inconclusive. Interestingly enough, the chemical appears naturally in the human lungs, skin, liver, blood, prostate, adrenal glands, and colon. It is the most dominant color component in those organs and is also thought to have a natural role in guarding against cancerous cells.

Lycopene supplements, also called “essence of tomatoes” and “tomato pills,” are sold worldwide. Daily dosages of these “wonder pills” are claimed to save lives, increase life spans, cut cholesterol, reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes, beat arthritis, help with diabetes, and keep the skin wrinkle-free. Bennett’s concept of tomato pills has come full circle.

5Slower Than A Turtle

How fast does Heinz ketchup exit the bottle? According to the company, the ketchup flows 0.045 kilometers (0.028 mi) per hour or about 1.3 centimeters (0.5 in) per second. To put things in perspective, some turtles travel at 0.8 kilometers (0.5 mi) per hour on land.

Heinz promotes their product’s slowness as a good feature. In 1979, the company made a commercial showing two boys waiting eagerly for ketchup to flow onto their food. The commercial was set to Carly Simon’s 1972 hit “Anticipation,” which became known as “The Ketchup Song.” The ad not only embedded the tune in ketchup lore, it was voted the best ad of the 20th century. Carly later expressed regret with the association between her song and the condiment.

Meanwhile, there’s an actual ketchup song, “Asereje (The Ketchup Song)” by Las Ketchup, a Spanish girl group. The song borrows from the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rappers Delight.” In a fruitful example of how the apple does not fall far from the tree, Las Ketchup is a group of sisters whose famous father is the flamenco guitarist El Tomate.

If, like the kids in the commercial, you are on pins and needles waiting for the ketchup to pour, tap the “57” on the bottle. Better yet, to increase the flow for any ketchup bottle, take the cap off and insert a straw. Make sure that the straw almost touches the bottom. This trick increases air flow, allowing the ketchup to move more quickly.

4The World’s Largest Ketchup Bottle

What do you do with a ketchup bottling plant and a water tower company? Combine forces, of course. This is what happened in Collinsville, Illinois, home of the world’s largest ketchup bottle.

The W.E. Caldwell Company, a Louisville, Kentucky firm that constructed tanks and towers, built the bottle in 1949 for the Collinsville-based G.S. Suppiger catsup-bottling plant. At the time, G.S. Suppiger made Brooks Catsup, back then known as “America’s largest selling TANGY catsup.” The sauce is immortalized as a huge, steel 21.4-meter (70.1 ft) tank on legs 30 meters (100 ft) tall, making the total height of the tower 52 meters (170 ft).

The world’s largest ketchup bottle is a rock star. It has its own website, fan club, and annual festival. It also has a role in promoting a healthy lifestyle. A walking club hosts a Catsup Bottle Water Tower Walk, and the bottle is the focus of an event called the Big Bottle Bicycle Ride. Today, the W.E. Caldwell Company is Caldwell Tanks. G.S. Suppiger no longer exists; it merged with the P.J. Ritter Company in 1959.

3The World’s Largest Ketchup Packet

The good people of Collinsville, Illinois set yet another ketchup record—the world’s largest ketchup packet. It also holds the record for being the world’s largest condiment sachet and is featured on the inside cover of the 2009 Guinness World Record book.

The hefty packet was created in 2007 at a fundraiser for the Collinsville Christian Academy, which had been damaged in a fire. Heinz donated 4,000 glass ketchup bottles. Participants paid $1 apiece for bottles, pouring the ketchup into a trough. Once inside the trough, the ketchup was sucked up by a hose and then poured into a packet made by Clear Lam Packaging.

This monster is 2.4 meters (8 ft) tall, 1.2 meters (4 ft) wide and 24 centimeters (9.5 in) thick. It weighs approximately 500 kilograms (1,100 lb) and holds 480 liters (127 gal) of ketchup.

2It Cleans! It Polishes! It Dyes! It’s Ketchup!

Ketchup is a miracle condiment. It’s a wonder it hasn’t been featured on a late-night commercial with an enthusiastic male host assisted by a beautiful woman.

Ketchup is acidic because of its tomatoes and vinegar. To the delight of penny-pinchers, this acidity makes it an inexpensive cleanser and polisher, especially for metals. It cleans the tarnish from copper. For pots and pans, coat the object, let it sit for 10 minutes, and then rinse it off. Cover tarnished pennies with ketchup for an hour, and then wash them. Ketchup is also highly effective on brass. People rub it on brass items such as jewelry and lamps to remove tarnish, using the same method as copper.

The condiment can polish steel, so it is used to shine silverware and steel sinks. It can also ruin silverware if left on too long, so quickly rinse it off. For stubborn tarnish, the ketchup can remain on for 15 minutes before removal. Because of its effectiveness on metals, frugal car owners shine the outside of their vehicles with the condiment.

1Multinational Party

Ketchup is used for almost any food you can think of, including sweets and beverages. To throw a party featuring international dishes, use a bottle of the magical red condiment.

Start with fried chicken dosed with ketchup, a dish favored in countries such as China, Thailand, and Jamaica. Add ketchup to pizza to practice a popular custom from places like Trinidad, India, Japan, Poland, and Norway. Want to add a Swedish flavor to pasta dishes at your shindig? Pour ketchup over spaghetti and macaroni.

Don’t forget dessert and snacks. Imitate our good Canadian neighbors—buy ketchup chips made by companies such as Lay’s and Herr’s, and make Canadian ketchup cake for celebrations. Include chocolate ketchup, like Hershey Resorts in Pennsylvania makes, as a barbecue or dipping sauce. Baskin-Robbins once experimented with ketchup ice cream but did not allow the flavor to leave the lab. Do not be disappointed. Either make it from scratch with a recipe such as Heinz’s carnival cream, or purchase some from mom and pop stores in New York. Finally, have your guests wash everything down with pruno, a prison wine concocted with ketchup, sugar, fruit cocktail, and oranges.

Kim Lewis is a freelancer who has been writing for the web for several years.

Birthdays are often a highlight of the year—a day reserved for joy, laughter, and celebration with those closest to us. Whether it’s a themed party for a child that’s filled with colorful balloons, decorations, and games or a simple adult gathering of friends and family, birthday parties are a way to create special memories, celebrate life, and bring people together. Blowing out candles, opening presents, and being surrounded by loved ones not only adds to the magic of the occasion but also reminds us that sometimes, it’s the simple joy of being celebrated that makes all the difference.

While most parties end in smiles, piles of wrapping paper, and cake crumbs left behind, unfortunately, sometimes even the best-laid plans can go awry. However, rather than a minor hiccup, cake mishap, or forgotten present, these celebrations went from joyous to jaw-dropping in an instant. They turned what should have been a festive event into something much more unforgettable.

In this list, we’ll explore ten stories of birthday parties that took an absolutely bizarre walk on the wild side, where celebrations were overshadowed by chaos, wild animal encounters, freak accidents, and, in some cases, outrageous human behavior. These stories prove that even the most carefully planned parties can take a surprising and untamed twist.

Related: 10 Milestone Moments That Turned into Tragedy

10 Birthday Bash Turns into Gator Dash

On August 14, 2021, Donnie Wiseman, his wife Theresa, and his six-year-old stepson attended a five-year-old’s birthday party at Scales and Tails in West Valley, Utah. Wiseman initially contemplated not attending the party, given that working long hours at his construction job had left him feeling worn out. However, as “a reptile enthusiast,” Wiseman decided to go at the last minute and was especially looking forward to seeing the petting zoo’s 11-year-old, 8.5-foot long (2.5 meters), 150-pound (68 kg) alligator named “Darth Gator.” Little did Wiseman know just how close he would be to the reptile or that he would become part of the show.

As the gator’s handler, Lindsay Bull, opened the door to feed the gator, he “got a little extra spunky.” When Darth Gator then tried to climb onto the platform in his enclosure, Bull gave the reptile a command to back up. However, the alligator did not obey and, instead, latched onto Bull’s hand.

Realizing that the alligator was about to do the infamous “death roll”—a maneuver where alligators spin rapidly to subdue their prey—Bull allowed herself to be pulled into the pool in an attempt to avoid any further injury or losing her arm. Within seconds, Wiseman began shouting for help, but when no one came, he decided to take matters into his own hands.

Wiseman leaped into the enclosure, wrestled the alligator with his bare hands, and jumped onto the gator’s back, pinning him down. As Wiseman used all of his 180-pound (81 kg) body weight to press down on the alligator, Bull instructed Wiseman to push his fists into the top of Darth Gator’s snout. Doing this shifted the power dynamic, taking the alligator from a position as a predator to that of prey. The pair made small talk and remained calm. After close to a minute, the alligator finally let go of Bull’s hand.

From there, another guest, Todd Christopher, was able to grab Bull under her arms and pull her out of the enclosure, but Wiseman was still inside, straddling the gator. However, thanks to Bull’s instruction, Wiseman was then able to climb off the alligator’s back and get away safely. Christopher’s wife, Amy, who has a nursing background, was able to treat Bull’s wounds until first responders arrived.

Bull was taken to a local hospital with injuries to her hand that required surgery. Despite the terrifying encounter, which was all captured on video by Wiseman’s wife, Bull was expected to make a full recovery, and she said she “can’t wait to get back to work.”^[1]

9 Party Pooper… Literally!

A 16th birthday is often seen as a milestone and, as such, celebrated with grandeur. However, whether it’s a “sweet sixteen” filled with fancy dresses and an elaborate cake or a more laid-back gathering of close friends, turning sixteen marks a coming-of-age moment—one that represents freedom, new beginnings, and the much-anticipated driver’s license. It’s also a day many teenagers dream about as the celebration allows them to be the center of attention and make memories that will last a lifetime.

However, for one unlucky birthday girl, the memories of her 16th birthday came in a form that no one could have predicted or wanted.

On May 17, 2015, Jacinda Cambray was enjoying her “sweet sixteen” party with around 40 guests at her home in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, what started as a perfectly planned backyard pool party quickly descended into chaos when “something brown started falling from the sky.” Rather than confetti raining down on the celebration, it was something much, much worse—feces! Yes, you read that right, feces!

Thankfully, the guests had finished with the cake, and it had been taken back inside before the unsanitary surprise. A specially erected canopy took most of the impact, sparing most of the partygoers from being blasted with human excrement. It was then that a relative, Kristie Rogy, used a smartphone app to discover that five planes were flying overhead at the time of the incident.

The family went on to file a complaint with the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA stated that the incident was being investigated as all planes are legally required to dispose of waste at the airport.

Unfortunately for Cambray, this birthday party will surely be memorable for all the wrong reasons, and she will certainly never forget the day an airplane took her party to a whole new level of crappy.^[2]

8 Bear Crashes Birthday Picnic and Enjoys Mexican Feast

On September 25, 2023, Silvia Macías of Mexico City, her son Santiago, and family friends Nathalia Fuentes and Angela Chapa visited the Chinique Ecological Park in San Pedro Garza García to celebrate Santiago’s 15th birthday. However, shortly after the group sat down to eat, a black bear decided to join the party and jumped onto their picnic table, devouring the tacos, enchiladas, french fries, and salsa meant for Santiago’s birthday dinner.

While they certainly never expected the four-legged intruder to crash their party, thankfully, Macías and Chapa had previously devised a plan should they come across a bear, given that Santiago, who has Down syndrome, is “very afraid of animals.” The plan was to “play a game” in which they would cover Santiago’s eyes and act like statues, and that’s exactly what they did.

Sitting just inches away from the bear’s mouth, Macías covered Santiago’s eyes, held him close to her chest, and remained stoic, keeping her eyes downward to avoid anything the bear might consider a challenge.

It was then that Chapa, who was recording the terrifying encounter, noticed a plate of enchiladas that the bear had not eaten. Chapa was able to get the bear’s attention by showing it the food and then tossing the container far away from the table. Just as Chapa expected, the bear followed the food, and she was able to stand in front of it, giving Macías and Santiago an opportunity to slowly back away.

The bear eventually went on its merry way. Still, the family did not let the scary encounter ruin or end their celebration. Santiago got his birthday tacos replaced, and everything ended well.^[3]

7 Cake and Chaos: Four-Year-Old’s Party Ruined in Police Fiasco

Stephanie Bures and her family were celebrating her four-year-old son T.J.’s birthday in their basement apartment in Chicago, Illinois, on February 10, 2019. However, as the children played a game of “Duck, Duck, Goose,” chaos descended on the party.

It was then that approximately 17 Chicago police officers, all dressed in plain clothes, entered the apartment with their weapons drawn and shouted, “Get your (expletive) hands up! We are doing an (expletive) raid.” Naturally in shock at the situation, an adult relative, Kiqiana Jackson, proceeded to ask the group who they were and why they were there and also requested to see a search warrant. Despite the fact that no one disobeyed orders, Jackson and several other adults were handcuffed in front of the children and taken outside into the cold.

To make matters worse, the family stated that the officers ransacked the home and took a door off its hinges, pried open wall panels, flipped mattresses, threw a big-screen TV to the floor, poured vodka over clothes, poured peroxide on T.J.’s presents, and smashed his cake. They also stated that the police officers “screamed profanity and insults,” “unlawfully questioned” T.J. and his seven-year-old sister Samari, and “joked and laughed throughout the raid.” However, no arrests were made.

So, what exactly was the reason for such a barbaric raid? Unfortunately, the family didn’t discover the reason or the huge mistake that was made until just before the officers left, when they placed a copy of the search warrant on the dining room table. The warrant was for a 46-year-old man who was allegedly dealing ecstasy. Not only did the family have no connection to the suspect, but the man in question had not lived in the apartment building for more than 5 years!

The family went on to file a federal lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department and the officers involved. On September 3, 2020, the Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee agreed to a $350,000 settlement in the case.^[4]

6 Birthday Dinner Ends in Flames

Samantha Myers of Greene County, Arkansas, said that her 26th birthday began on a positive note—her husband and children woke her up with a “happy birthday” greeting, the family went to church, and they later surprised her with a card and some candy. However, Myers’s husband, children, and in-laws had one more surprise for the birthday girl—a family dinner at Kimono Japanese Steakhouse in Paragould, Arkansas.

Unfortunately, the surprise birthday dinner on February 9, 2020, came to a fiery finish and ended with a trip to the hospital.

Once at the restaurant, the family sat around a Hibachi grill and enjoyed the experience of watching the chef prepare their meal. Sadly, the celebration then took a tragic turn. Myers stated that after the chef finished cooking their food, he made a heart shape on the grill and lit it on fire. The chef then went to draw a second heart—while the first heart was still on fire—but it was then that a “fireball burst off the grill” and “exploded,” setting both Myers and the chef on fire.

In a panic and screaming in pain, Myers ran to the bathroom to get water and put out the fire. Myers’s mother-in-law ran after her in an attempt to help and also repeatedly asked one of the employees if they had any burn cream. However, Myers claimed that the restaurant did nothing to help at the time, so the two women left the restaurant to go to the hospital. Myers, however, insisted that the rest of the family stay behind and finish their meal.

Myers sustained first- and second-degree burns to her face, neck, and chest, an infection in both eyes, and singed eyebrows and eyelashes. The details of the chef’s injuries were unknown.

While they were not charged for the meal and the restaurant offered to pay her medical bills, Myers stated that she intended to sue Kimono.^[5]

5 Elderly Woman’s Birthday Dinner Party Interrupted by Masked Intruders

Wendy Melvin was hosting a small dinner party at her home in Squamish, British Columbia, to celebrate her mother’s 77th birthday on December 17, 2022. However, just as the partygoers were finishing the cake, two uninvited, masked guests decided to crash the party—raccoons.

Despite the unexpected intrusion, thankfully, the two raccoons were quite polite and caused no trouble. Melvin stated, “They tried out every chair, posed for many photos, and then curled up in two furry balls and fell asleep.”^[6]

4 Birthday Celebration Turns Brutal with a Nose-Biting Twist

On April 5, 2019, Shane Groves went to the Progressive Club—a private members’ club—in Alexandra Terrace, Sutton-in-Ashfield, to celebrate his birthday. However, during the party, Groves began verbally abusing his brother’s friend, hurling homophobic comments.

When Groves’s brother stepped in and tried to intervene between the men, Groves responded by throwing a chair at his brother’s friend. Unfortunately, the dispute didn’t end there. Groves later tried to headbutt his brother, but instead, “clamped” his teeth onto his brother’s nose, and the pair ended up grappling. Several people attempted to separate the siblings, but when they were pulled apart, the tip of Groves’s brother’s nose was severed, causing the appendage to “end up on the club floor.”

Groves’s brother was taken to Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham, where his nose was sewn back on, but unfortunately, it did not take. Additionally, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Groves’s brother was forced to wait for the first of three reconstructive operations to try and repair the damage.

Groves pleaded guilty to grievous bodily harm, and on November 5, 2020, he was sentenced to 25 months in prison.^[7]

3 Family Birthday Party Ends in Heartbreak After Freak Accident

A family birthday party is usually a time for joy, laughter, and celebration- a chance for loved ones to come together and create cherished memories. For one family, however, a freak accident replaced the joy of celebration with shock and sorrow as they found themselves mourning the loss of a beloved child in a tragedy that no one could have foreseen.

On July 11, 2021, two-year-old Delilah Hunt was sitting on a four-wheeler, surrounded by her family, at a birthday party in Gordonville, Texas, when the unthinkable happened. Family members were in the process of moving a truck—only a few feet away from where Hunt was—but when they started the vehicle, the truck’s AC compressor plate popped off, striking the toddler in the head.

Hunt was flown to Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, in critical condition. Sadly, Hunt, who was described as “the smartest and the spunkiest little two-year-old who just loved the world,” was later taken off life support and pronounced dead on July 14, 2021.^[8]

2 Tragedy at the Adventure Center

The Kong Adventure Centre in Keswick, England, features a state-of-the-art climbing wall, bouldering room, artificial caving system, a children’s hard play area, as well as a cafe ́ and a shop that sells specialty clothing and equipment for outdoor climbing. While this seems like a perfect place for the whole family, what began as a playful adventure at the facility took a devastating turn.

On April 22, 2023, 49-year-old Carl O’Keeffe went to Kong Adventure Centre to attend a celebration for his niece’s birthday. During their time there, O’Keeffe and four children went on an indoor caving experience. Unfortunately, at some point after entering the indoor cave, O’Keeffe attempted to turn around in the narrow tunnel but wound up getting stuck inside the center’s 229-foot (70-meter) long caving network.

The staff at Kong Adventure Centre was unfortunately not able to rescue O’Keeffe, so emergency services were called. Six crews from Cumbria Fire and Rescue, police, Keswick Mountain Rescue, Cumbria Ore Mines Rescue Unit, Great North Air Ambulance, and the Northwest Ambulance Service’s Hazardous Area Response Team worked with staff and visiting climbers. After over four hours, O’Keeffe was finally freed. O’Keeffe was then rushed to the Cumberland Infirmary’s intensive care unit in Carlisle with “crush injuries.”

Sadly, on April 30, 2023, O’Keeffe passed away. O’Keeffe’s older sister, Olivia Short, stated his death was the result of multiple organ failure.^[9]

1 Drunk Driver Crashes Into Party and Kills 2, Injures 15 Guests

On April 20, 2024, a child’s birthday party was being held at the Swan Boat Club in Berlin Charter Township, Michigan. However, as guests were sitting, eating, and enjoying the festivities, a car plunged 25 feet (7.6 meters) into the building, killing four-year-old Zayn Phillips and his sister, eight-year-old Alanah Phillips, and injuring 15 others.

The driver, 66-year-old Marshella Marie Chidester, was taken to the Monroe County Jail and charged with two counts of second-degree homicide, two counts of operating while intoxicated causing death, and four counts of operating while intoxicated causing serious injury.

Chidester, who was supposed to be meeting her husband at the birthday party at the boat club, claimed that all of a sudden, she “blacked out” and had no recollection of entering the parking lot of the boat club or anything leading up to the crash. Chidester has a history of epileptic-type seizures in her legs that result in paralysis, leading her attorney to believe she had a seizure behind the wheel.

Monroe County Prosecutor Jeffrey Yorkey, however, claimed that there was no evidence that Chidester had a seizure on the day of the crash, stating that a breath test indicated “she was significantly over the legal limit of 0.08.” Yorkie also stated that Chidester was not supposed to be drinking with the medication she was taking for her seizures, but Chidester admitted to drinking that day.

Attorneys representing the victims have also filed a lawsuit against the boat club, alleging that the building hosting the party on the end of a dirt road wasn’t designed to protect the people inside. (Link 51) They are also suing Verna’s Tavern, the bar that Chidester allegedly visited before the crash.^[10]

As far as we know, every animal must rest at some point. We didn’t used to think so. Some animals, like the dolphin or bullfrog, simply have sleep habits that look an awful lot like not sleeping to the human eye.

But even those that don’t sleep at all still rest. Most insects enter into a state called torpor, which significantly reduces their awareness. Even bacteria have been shown to follow a circadian rhythm, cycling through different levels of activity based on changes in the light.

Sleep is still somewhat mysterious to us. We know that it is somehow linked to memory and we die when we miss enough of it. That covers a lot of what we know about our own sleep.

We know even less about what sleep does for each member of the animal kingdom. We do know that the need for sleep tends to exist in a delicate balancing act with the need to not become some other creature’s midnight snack. Sometimes, that means that animals develop bizarre sleep habits that we find hard to imagine copying.

10 Apes Sleep Like We Do

Every species of great ape sleeps in some kind of bed, whether those are the platforms that wild apes build in trees or the plush mattresses that humans nestle into in the comfort and safety of our own homes.

Lesser apes and monkeys don’t do this, opting instead to sleep sitting on a tree branch while they wobble and sway and occasionally waking up to check for predators. This difference is thought to have been instrumental in the evolution of great apes and, eventually, humans.

As great apes grew bigger, it became harder for them to find branches that could easily and comfortably support them. When the first great ape built a platform to sleep on sometime between 23 to 5 million years ago, the benefits of doing so became apparent.

Those who slept on platforms could shelter higher and were a bit more hidden from predators. At the same time, they were able to rest out of the range of mosquitoes. But the best advantage was that great apes could now get restorative deep sleep which helped enable the improved cognitive functions needed to grow bigger and better brains.^[1]

9 Elephants And Giraffes Sleep Standing Up

As large prey animals, elephants and giraffes are the opposite of great apes when it comes to sleep. They cannot hide away to rest and need to be ready to run at any moment. So they have naturally evolved to sleep standing up.^[2]

Sometimes referred to as a “stay apparatus,” these animals have a knee that locks in place so that they don’t have to rely on their muscles to stay standing in sleep. They share this mechanism with horses, cows, and even birds.

These animals still have to lie down sometimes, though. While standing, they cannot enter into REM sleep. Even though these two creatures require very little REM sleep, they still need it.

An elephant needs REM sleep about once every three to four days and only for about 30 minutes at a time. If they stay on the ground any longer than that, their internal organs may give out under the pressure of their immense weight.

A giraffe sleeps about 30 minutes a day. They tend to get this sleep in very short bursts, usually no longer than five minutes at a time.

8 Dolphins Sleep With One Eye Open

As well as other cetaceans, the dolphin is another creature that can’t exactly lie down to sleep. Most marine mammals have to be on the lookout for predators, but they also have to contend with the fact that they need to consciously breathe oxygen to live.

Unlike humans, dolphins breathe voluntarily and can’t become unconscious without the risk of drowning. Finally, dolphins are warm-blooded mammals living in the cool waters of the ocean. They need to keep moving to keep up their body temperature. When an animal has to keep moving, there’s only one logical thing to do: Just sleep one-half of the brain at a time. Easy.

Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep allows dolphins to get the sort of restorative sleep needed by intelligent animals, but it isn’t just for cetaceans. Many species of birds, especially migratory ones, also engage in unihemispheric sleep.

Unlike migratory birds, dolphins don’t tend to cover large distances while half asleep. Many dolphins manage to hang near the surface or swim slowly, but all generally close one eye to sleep. Probably because of this habit, some have been observed sleeping while swimming in circles.^[3]

7 Newborn Orcas Can’t Sleep

Orcas and other cetaceans don’t sleep for the first month after birth. Usually, adult orcas will sleep about 5–8 hours a day, but neither the mother nor her calf can sleep until 3–4 weeks after birth.

The mortality rate is extremely high for calves, so at least part of this is likely to keep predators away. Not many creatures are willing to contend with a mother orca defending her calf. However, there are a few more reasons that orca calves can’t sleep.^[4]

The calf doesn’t have the muscle strength to keep up with the pod, and it doesn’t have the necessary blubber to stay warm and afloat. To stay alive, the calf needs to stay in its mother’s slipstream where it will be pulled along without getting separated.

As the adult orca must keep moving to generate that slipstream, she can’t sleep, either. Researchers also believe that orca mothers forgo the unihemispheric sleep that cetaceans rely on, too, as none have been observed to swim with an eye closed.

6 Ducks Sleep All In A Row

Unlike orcas, ducks aren’t keen to miss any of their beauty sleep. There’s a reason that to “get one’s ducks in a row” means to have one’s affairs and priorities in order. It turns out that ducks are pretty smart when it comes to catching a few z’s. They can engage in unihemispheric sleep, but they do so using an interesting strategy that wards off any predator looking for a fatty duck dinner.^[5]

Ducks often sleep in a row where the ducks on either side sleep with the outward-facing eye open and one hemisphere of the brain alert. The ducks in the middle get to sleep both hemispheres while secure because of the lookout ducks, and the lookouts get to rest up a little at a time.

All the ducks benefit by getting some sleep without also getting eaten. We’re just hoping that they trade off for lookout duty sometimes.

5 Migratory Birds Power Nap

Scientists have theorized in the past that migratory birds sleep in midair because the only other explanation is that the birds simply do not sleep for weeks or months at a time. Recently, though, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute and colleagues from other institutions have studied the sleep habits of frigatebirds. These creatures sleep about 12 hours a day when nesting on land but often spend weeks soaring over the ocean in search of food.

Their study found that the frigatebirds are indeed able to sleep in midair with one or both hemispheres of the brain and can enter into REM sleep without dropping. The birds can do this because they only sleep for a few minutes at a time and only for a few seconds when getting REM sleep. The birds also used their ability to sleep one hemisphere at a time to ensure that they didn’t knock into other birds while ascending and descending.^[6]

4 Reptiles Might Dream

Until recently, the general consensus was that only mammals and birds experienced REM sleep. This is the kind of sleep thought to consolidate memories and the sleep that many creatures risk death to achieve daily. Reptiles, amphibians, insects, and amoebae were excluded from the dreamers.

This was puzzling from an evolutionary standpoint as birds are far more closely related to reptiles than to us. But, with the evidence available at the time, scientists just had to shrug and assume that birds and mammals spontaneously evolved to dream around the same time.

New research from Gilles Laurent from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, had surprising results that may force us to revise that assumption. When researchers hooked bearded dragons up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), they noticed some very familiar sleep cycles.

The dragons studied went through about 350 80-second cycles per night that seemed simple in comparison to the four or five 90-minute ones that humans experience. Scientists now theorize that mammals, birds, and reptiles share a common ancestor that developed cyclical sleep about 300 million years ago.^[7]

But what do reptiles dream about? Laurent said, “If I were an Australian dragon living in Frankfurt, I’d be dreaming of a warm day in the sun.”

3 Fish Aren’t Afraid Of The Dark

Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues performed sleep studies using zebrafish with the hope that they would see whether the fish could suffer from insomnia or sleep deprivation. They found that the fish followed a simple circadian rhythm.

When lights are on, the fish don’t sleep at all. When they’re off, the creatures will nap if there is a sleep debt to pay up. For the fish, it’s far simpler than for mammals. Light triggers the release of a hormone that overrides the need for sleep until nighttime rolls around again. Lucky fish.

This isn’t the case for one particular species of fish, though. The eyeless Mexican cave fish experiences no circadian rhythm whatsoever. Damian Moran of the private company Plant and Food Research studied the eyeless Mexican tetra as well as its surface-dwelling counterpart by putting them both into fish treadmills where they could swim against a current constantly. The surface tetras used more energy under lights than in the dark, while the eyeless tetras didn’t change at all.

It makes sense that a creature that lives in total darkness and is eyeless doesn’t give a flying flip about light cycles, but the most interesting finding was what this meant for their energy use overall. Using less energy at night didn’t leave the surface tetras better off. Instead, they used 27 percent more energy than their eyeless cousins. This energy was spent revving up their metabolisms to expend more daytime energy and slowing it back down at night.^[8]

2 Parrotfish Sleep In A Bubble

Parrotfish are already gunning for a top spot on the world’s strangest animal list considering that they crunch on coral reef and change their color and sex fairly often. But this fish isn’t stopping when it comes to sleeping.

When the parrotfish settles in for a good night’s rest, it activates special glands in the gills to secrete a mucus bubble around itself. Scientists have long debated why the parrotfish does this, postulating that it may lower the chances of being eaten by eels or act as a kind of fishy sunscreen.

Alexandra Grutter from the University of Queensland is one scientist who thinks she knows why parrotfish sleep in a jelly cocoon. Fish who hang around the reef at night are vulnerable to tiny bloodsucking crustaceans called gnathiid isopods. During the day, cleaner fish nip these little ocean mosquitoes before they can latch on. At night, however, even cleaner fish have to sleep.

Grutter tested this theory by removing some sleeping parrotfish from their cocoons and leaving them vulnerable to gnathiids. The exposed fish were attacked mercilessly while the cocooned ones were largely ignored.^[9]

1 Walruses Snooze By The Skin Of Their Teeth

A walrus can forgo sleep for up to 84 hours at a time. While plenty of animals go without much sleep for a long time, only walruses do so regularly and without any notable signs of sleepiness. This finding may force sleep researchers to reevaluate ideas of how much sleep a mammal needs. On land, a walrus can sleep deeply for up to 19 hours at a time, possibly to make up for their sleep debt.^[10]

When not avoiding sleep like a college student cramming for finals, the walrus still acts much like a college kid by sleeping just about anywhere with no problem. When in water, walruses will sleep floating on the surface, lying at the bottom, or standing and leaning. These sleeps are short because a walrus needs to come up for air from time to time.

However, some enterprising walruses have figured out how to have the best of both worlds. They dig their massive tusks into an ice floe and drift off to sleep. Their head stays above water while the rest of their body is submerged, which must be super comfortable for an animal that’s never heard of brain freeze.

Renee Chandler is an Atlanta-based graphic designer and writer. She is currently coauthoring a project that you can preview and support at www.patreon.com/pterohog.

Sonny Liston was one of the hardest hitters the boxing world has ever seen. Standing 185 centimeters (6’1″) tall and packing over 90 kilograms (200 lb) of pure muscle, there’s a reason he was nicknamed “The Big Bear,” and it wasn’t for the hugs he gave.

His career in heavyweight boxing spanned from 1953 to 1970, and he spent all 17 of those years going guts for glory against the biggest men this side of the Van Allen belt. But no matter how many punches Liston threw in the ring, he still couldn’t knock out his past.

10A Tough Beginning

Sonny Liston was born into the unenviable position of not being wanted. He was the 24th child out of 25, and another child only meant another mouth to feed. The Listons were poor, overworked, and underpaid, struggling even before the Great Depression hit. When they moved to Arkansas in 1916 (before Sonny was born), Sonny’s mother, Helen, was only 16. His father was closer to 50.

There, the Listons toiled in the dusty earth to grow cotton and peanuts as sharecroppers. They sent three-quarters of everything they made back to the man from whom they rented their land, leaving the growing family with barely enough to get by. And just as the economy collapsed, along came little Sonny. His mother moved away when he was young, leaving Sonny in the care of his father, Tobe.

When Sonny was eight, Tobe sent Sonny to work rather than to school. Tobe believed that if children were “big enough to go to the dinner table, they’re big enough to go to the fields.” But that wasn’t the worst part. Sonny later said, “The only thing my old man ever gave me was a beating.” Even at the height of his boxing career, Sonny still bore the scars of the whippings he got as a young boy from his father.

9No Age And No Home

Sonny often guessed his birth date to be somewhere around 1932 or 1933, but he never knew for sure. He never even knew exactly what town in Arkansas he’d been born in. He sometimes said that when he was born, someone carved his name and the date on an old tree on the family’s rented land. “Trouble is,” he’d continue, “they cut down the tree.” The only reality for him was that he was poor and black in the middle of the Great Depression, and nobody ever let him forget it.

Sonny never went to school, so he never learned how to read. That fact became a ribbing point for journalists later on when he began to make a name for himself, but he never let it stop him from getting where he wanted to go.

When he was about 13, he decided that he’d had enough of the cotton fields and his father’s daily abuse, so he hatched a plan: The next morning, he woke up before everyone else and spent the whole morning picking pecans from his brother-in-law’s tree. He took the pecans downtown and sold them, garnering enough money for a one-way ticket to St. Louis, Missouri, where his mother lived.

But without an address, he was just a country boy lost in a big city. It was only after a few days and a heaping helping of luck that he chanced on his mother’s home. Once he found that, he was sure that life was about to get a lot better. He was wrong.

8The Yellow Shirt Bandit

Life with his mother in St. Louis was a different kind of hard than the life he’d known on the farm, but it was still hard. Sonny worked any way he could, eking out a living as a teenager in a city where he was the wrong color at the wrong time.

Although he tried to go to school, he couldn’t read and was already a hulking mountain despite his young age, so he eventually left school and began taking odd jobs around his neighborhood. He sold whatever he could. He got into fights at work and then found new work. He cleaned chickens at the local market, earning $15 a week. “On the good days,” he said, “I ate . . . but eating’s a hard habit to get out of.”

It wasn’t long before his meager paycheck wasn’t enough. By the time Sonny was 16, he was stealing from grocery stores with some of the other kids in his neighborhood. As the years passed, the crimes escalated. Finally, one cold January night in 1950, Sonny walked into a diner with a .32 revolver in his hand and a yellow-and-black checkered shirt on his back and took the place for everything they had: $37.

It was a rush. After splitting the take with the driver and his two accomplices, Sonny and his gang drove down the street and rushed into a filling station for a second robbery in less than 20 minutes. They went to a bar after to celebrate, not knowing that the police were already onto them. The cops even had a name for Sonny and his big checkered shirt: the “Yellow Shirt Bandit.”

When Sonny stumbled out of the bar later that night, there was a policeman waiting for him. He was arrested and given five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary.

7A Boxer And A Car Thief

To paraphrase George Jung, Sonny Liston went into prison with a bachelor’s in brawling and came out with a doctorate in boxing. He started out like any other prisoner, just serving his time the best that he could. He worked in the laundry room, took his meals like any other inmate, and rarely made a fuss. But when a prison chaplain named Father Alois Stephens took special notice of him, the planet shifted in its orbit. Maybe Sonny didn’t know it then, but that moment changed the course of his entire life.

Father Stephens wanted him to try boxing.

Soon enough, the prison started to take notice. One of the other inmates in the prison, a car thief named Sam Eveland who had a history of boxing, took Sonny under his wing. Together, they laid the groundwork for everything Sonny would need in his later boxing career. He refused to learn the alphabet, but “you’d show him a punch or a technique and by the end of the day he had it down.”

Sonny got his big break when Father Stephens arranged for a local heavyweight fighter, Thurman Wilson, to get into the ring with Sonny in prison. It was his first bout with a real fighter, and he threw everything he had at it. It only took four rounds before Wilson was begging to end the fight, saying, “You better get me out of this ring. He’s going to kill me!”

6A Killing Machine

In 1952, Sonny was released on parole with the help of Father Stephens, who promised the parole board that he’d get Sonny involved in boxing to keep him away from crime. After a brief amateur career that barely lasted 11 months, Sonny signed on to the big leagues as a professional boxer. His first professional fight was over in 33 seconds. All it took was one punch to knock his opponent out cold.

From that point on, it seemed that Sonny could do nothing but good. His trainer, Johnny Tocco, called him “a killing machine” in the ring. After the first knockout, he went on a nine-win streak before finally losing a grueling eight-round match with Marty Marshall.

But no matter how hard he fought in the ring, Liston couldn’t fight real life. Around St. Louis, he was watched by the police constantly. Often, they would stop him on the street and search him for weapons. He had a reputation that he couldn’t shake. In 1956, it got the best of him when he threw a fist at a policeman and stole his gun. He served in a workhouse for nine months, and it seemed like his boxing career had hit a brick wall. But as Sonny already knew, if there’s a wall in front of you, you darn well break through it.

5Unstoppable

Fresh out of prison for the second time, Sonny moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to try to pick up the scraps of his career. There weren’t many. His old manager was broke, the world saw him as an illiterate brute, and the police were suspicious of his alleged ties with St. Louis mobster John Vitale. Even in Philadelphia, he found himself in trouble with the law, and he was suspended from boxing for three months after resisting arrest.

But he wormed his way back into the ring as surely as a fox sneaks into a henhouse. By the time he’d won his third consecutive fight in May 1955, the world was ready to take notice of Sonny “Big Bear” Liston once again. Then he won a fourth and a fifth, and suddenly the fox was taking the coop apart one chicken at a time. Over the next nine years, Sonny didn’t lose a single match. He was unstoppable. When he stepped into the ring with heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson in 1962, he had 26 consecutive wins under his belt, with 34 total wins out of 35 fights.

The fight with Floyd Patterson lasted less than one round, and in those fateful seconds, Sonny secured the title of heavyweight champion of the world.

4The First Ali Fight

Already riding high on his newly won title, Sonny reached the stratosphere when he defeated Floyd Patterson again after the former champ came back to reclaim his title. Like the first fight, this one was over with a knockout in the first round. It clinched it: Nobody could defeat Big Bear.

Then came Cassius Clay. Soon to be known by a different name, Clay was a young upstart from Kentucky who’d only been boxing for three years before he went up against Sonny. With less than 20 fights under his belt, Clay was barely a match for now-veteran Sonny Liston, the knockout king with a criminal past. Bookies had the odds at 7–1 in Sonny’s favor.

But from the first seconds of the opening round, Sonny knew he’d met a worthy opponent. He could smash bricks to powder with his haymaker, sure, but Cassius Clay was too fast to land any. And with every missed punch, Clay was landing two or three jabs right in the honeypot.

As the match wore on, the two giants raged back and forth. Sonny took the lead in the fourth round, but Clay snatched it right back in the fifth. By the sixth, both men were exhausted, bruised and bloody, and ready for the fight to end.

And then, it did. Sonny never came out for the seventh round. The crowd fell to a hush and then rose up with an angry roar. Not since 1919 had any heavyweight champion quit a match like that. Cassius Clay, who later changed his name to Muhammad Ali, had won the heavyweight title at the age of 22.

3The Second Ali Fight

Just why he decided to quit in the seventh round, nobody knew. Sonny sure wasn’t telling. What he was doing was training. In a year, he was going up against Clay again, and this time, he wasn’t planning to quit. Clay was now officially Muhammad Ali. He’d been accepted into the Nation of Islam after his surprise upset victory against Sonny Liston. Sonny began running 8 kilometers (5 mi) every morning, and he spent hours in the gym, blowing through partner after partner in sparring bouts. He was primed, focused, and ready.

The fight was scheduled to be held in Boston, but at the last minute the location had to be moved. Venue after venue was explored, but it all came to nothing. It seemed that nobody wanted to host the fight because of Liston’s mysterious mob connections and Ali’s newfound ties to the Nation of Islam. Finally, the location was moved to a high school hockey rink in Lewiston, Maine, and the date was set.

Both fighters were prepared, but the match was destined to be a shocker. The audience had barely settled into their seats when Ali hit Sonny with a lightning-fast jab, and the big man went down. Nobody could believe it. While Sonny rolled on the mat and Ali stood over him shouting, “Get up and fight, sucker,” the referees were scrambling to get a count on the knock-down clock.

After a tense 12 seconds, they called the fight. Ali had won by a knockout in the first round, unseating the former champion who’d never been knocked out in his life with a punch that barely anybody saw. It was a controversial victory, and there are still people who claim that the fight was fixed. We’ll probably never know.

2The Final Fight

After losing his second fight to Muhammad Ali, Sonny left boxing for a year. He came back in 1966, perhaps hoping to revive the career that he’d lost, and for awhile it seemed like it might happen. He hit Sweden first, burning through four opponents like a California wildfire in a high wind. After that, he went stateside, even going so far as to say he was ready to fight Ali again. He never got the chance, but he continued to run his comeback streak through 14 consecutive wins.

The last defeat he ever faced came on December 6, 1969, when he fought Leotis Martin. It was the fourth time in his life that he’d ever lost, making him all the more eager to prove that he still had what it took. In 1970, he got his chance when he signed a contract to fight Chuck Wepner in Jersey City.

Wepner was an ex-Marine who was relatively new to the world of boxing, but Sonny wasn’t going to be caught off guard like he had in his first fight with Ali. He went into the fight with both fists swinging. After taking a hard hit in the first round, he slowly but surely beat Wepner to a pulp. By round seven, Wepner’s left eye was swollen shut. By round eight, there was blood coursing down his cheeks. And in round nine, the referee stopped the fight. There was just too much blood. Liston was unanimously declared the victor, and Wepner was sent away to get 72 stitches. It was the last great moment of Sonny Liston’s life.

1Contract With A Dead Man

By the time Canadian boxer George Chuvalo signed a contract to fight Sonny Liston, Sonny had already been dead for a week. His wife found his body in their home in Las Vegas. She’d been visiting family in St. Louis at the time of his death. The official death report called it natural causes, although investigators had found a balloon filled with heroin near the body. One of Sonny’s arms was covered in needle marks, which led to the obvious speculation that he’d died of a drug overdose.

But other theories arose as well. According to one of his close friends, Sonny had a morbid fear of needles. Others have repeated the sentiment. That’s saying a lot for someone who spent his life facing down punches from some of the toughest men in the world. But it raised the question of whether someone had killed Sonny and then arranged the crime scene to make it look like he’d overdosed. There’s even a witness willing to testify to it—in 2013, a man came forward claiming to be the son of the mafia hit man who’d killed Sonny.

Why? Who knows. Maybe it’s not even true. His death, it seems, is destined to be as much of a mystery as his beginnings. For a man whose gravestone reads plain and simple, “A Man,” Sonny Liston definitely had more complexities than the world ever realized.

Eli Nixon is the author of Son of Tesla and the upcoming Mind of Tesla. He also wrote something about a bird.

While the Wild West wasn’t quite the world of gunslingers and desperadoes portrayed in movies, it was still a dangerous place. With law enforcement often miles away, criminals flourished, and people were left to take matters into their own hands—often with terrifying results.

10The People Under The Floor

In 1870, a man was making his way through the lonely mountains of New Mexico when he came across a stout wood cabin tucked at the foot of the Palo Flechado pass. The owner introduced himself as Charles Kennedy and invited his new acquaintance inside for a meal.

As Kennedy’s Ute wife served dinner, the traveler sat next to the couple’s young son and asked if there were other Native Americans nearby. The boy looked back at him for a moment and then answered: “Can’t you smell the one Papa put under the floor?”

The unfortunate traveler had stumbled into the lair of one of the West’s most notorious killers. Charles Kennedy killed at least 14 people who stopped at his isolated homestead on their way through the pass. After shooting the traveler, Kennedy beat his son to death for nearly warning the man in time to escape.

The murder of their son was too much for Kennedy’s wife, who slipped out of the house while her husband was drunk and walked to Elizabethtown, where she made a full confession. After unearthing the grisly evidence, the townsfolk dragged Kennedy behind a horse until he died and then staked his severed head outside the local inn.

9Clay Allison’s War Dance

The leader of the mob that butchered Charles Kennedy was Clay Allison, a violent local vigilante who might have racked up a higher body count than the serial killer he beheaded. On one occasion, he tried to settle a petty dispute with a neighbor by digging a grave and proposing that they have a knife fight inside it, thus saving the effort of moving the loser’s body.

Allison gained notoriety as one of the deadliest participants in the Colfax County War, a massive land dispute that caused up to 200 murders. At the start of the war, Allison organized the lynching of a local constable he suspected was moonlighting as an assassin. When the dead man’s uncle came looking for revenge, Allison got the drop on him and shot him dead in the local saloon. He reportedly then stripped naked, tied a red ribbon around his penis, and did a “war dance” around the crime scene.

8The Going Snake Fight

Nobody’s certain exactly what caused the feud that left 11 men dead in Judge Blackhawk Sixkiller’s courtroom at Going Snake. Whatever it was, it came to a head in 1872, when Zeke Proctor rode up to Jim Kesterton’s mill and opened fire. The miller recovered from his wounds, but his wife, Polly Beck, was hit by a stray round and killed.

The murder took place in the Cherokee Nation, and Proctor and Beck were both Cherokee, so it seemed obvious that the case would be handled by the Cherokee courts. But Proctor came from a well-connected family and was a member of the powerful Keetoowah Society. As a result, the Becks argued that they couldn’t get a fair hearing in Indian Territory. They wanted the case transferred to the federal court at Fort Smith. When their request was rejected, a group of Becks burst into the courtroom and opened fire.

But things went wrong for the Becks, who found themselves crowded in the doorway of the windowless courtroom. Zeke Porter somehow produced a gun and fired back, as did several guards. The planned massacre turned into a nightmarish close-range battle. Eleven men died: seven Becks, two Proctors, a lawyer, and a US marshal. The participants quickly scattered, and nobody was ever convicted over the incident.

7The Crusade Of Felipe Espinosa

Felipe Espinosa was a petty criminal who deeply resented the movement of Anglo-American settlers into 19th-century Colorado. He was also a fanatical member of the Penitentes, a local Catholic brotherhood known for whipping themselves bloody and performing other acts of self-mutilation. When American soldiers tried to arrest him for banditry, Felipe declared his own personal war on the Protestant interlopers.

Accompanied by his brother Vivian, and later his nephew Jose, Felipe roamed through the mountains of Colorado, slaughtering every Anglo he came across. Some of the bodies were found with a cross carved into their chest. Felipe wrote taunting letters to the governor, telling him to inquire if anyone had ever “killed as many men as the Espinosas. We have killed thirty-two.” Despite a massive manhunt, which killed Vivian Espinosa, Felipe remained elusive. In a letter to his wife, he boasted:

They have hands and cannot touch me;
They have feet and cannot catch me;
They have eyes and cannot hear me;
They have ears and cannot hear me.

The desperate government finally hired the famed mountain man Tom Tobin, who tracked Felipe and Jose Espinosa through the Sangre de Cristos and personally killed both in a bloody battle near the summit of Mount Mestas. Tobin then returned to Fort Garland and collected his bounty by dumping Felipe Espinosa’s severed head in front of the shocked colonel who had hired him.

6The Cowboy Cop Of El Paso

In 1881, El Paso, Texas, hired the legendary gunfighter Dallas Stoudenmire as their new marshal. He successfully cleaned up the town, but only by launching a reign of terror in which he killed numerous locals in shoot-outs. It was said that he used the church bell for target practice and was often visibly drunk. When the town council tried to fire him, Stoudenmire charged in and dared them to try taking his guns.

Stoudenmire’s most famous gunfight took place just three days after taking the job. The “Four Dead in Five Seconds” fight started when a local ruffian named John Hale grabbed a gun from his friend George Campbell and killed one of Stoudenmire’s constables. Stoudenmire immediately whipped out his own pistols and gunned down Hale, a random bystander, and Campbell (who was loudly shouting that he wanted nothing to do with the fight).

Campbell had been good friends with the wealthy Manning brothers, who hired a man named Bill Johnson to assassinate Stoudenmire in revenge. Unfortunately for Johnson, he discharged his shotgun early, allowing Stoudenmire to whirl around and shoot his testicles off. He quickly bled to death, and Stoudenmire remained in El Paso until he died in a shoot-out with the Manning brothers 18 months later.

5The Horrible Horrells

The Horrell Brothers were a nightmarish family of cowboys who carried out some of the Old West’s worst atrocities. In 1873, they murdered five policemen in a Texas bar and fled to Lincoln County, New Mexico. Shortly after they arrived, Ben Horrell drunkenly gunned down yet another lawman, only to be murdered in turn by a local posse. Ben’s killers were mostly of Mexican descent and the remaining Horrells decided to take revenge on the entire Hispanic community.

The ensuing race war started with the murder of two Mexican Americans on the Horrell ranch. A few weeks later, the Horrells burst into a wedding reception and killed four guests. Local Hispanics armed themselves and seized the hills surrounding the Horrell property, but the Horrells withstood a short siege and escaped before the ranch was burned to the ground. Recruiting a gang of Texans, they rode through the country massacring random Mexicans (and at least one Anglo with a Mexican wife).

The killings ended when local authorities requested military assistance and the Horrells fled back to Texas. Official estimates say at least 29 people died in the “war.”

4The Horrell-Higgins Feud

After returning to Lampasas, Texas, the Horrells secured a jury of their old cronies and were promptly acquitted of the New Mexico murders. But the crimes would catch up with them in a way. In 1877, Merritt Horrell died in a barfight with rancher “Pink” Higgins. Since everyone remembered the massacres triggered by Ben Horrell’s death, the terrified Higgins family decided that they had no option but to strike first.

In March, the Higgins clan ambushed Tom and Mart Horrell on their way to court. But they were no match for a hardened killer like Mart Horrell, who stood over his wounded brother and single-handedly drove off the attackers. By June, Lampasas had become a miniature war zone, as the feuding families battled each other through the town.

The Texas Rangers ended the feud by forcing the clans to sign a “peace treaty.” Astonishingly, the Horrells were allowed to continue their criminal ways for another year, until Mart and Tom were murdered by an enraged mob, apparently incited by Pink Higgins.

3The Bascom Incident

In 1860, the inexperienced Lieutenant George Bascom was ordered to retrieve a young boy who had been kidnapped in a Native American raid. Bascom wrongly believed the Chiricahua Apache were responsible and rode off to find their leader, Cochise. Meanwhile, Cochise had no idea he was being hunted and simply rode into Bascom’s camp for a visit one day, accompanied by his wife and son.

A ridiculous conversation followed, with Bascom making all sorts of threats unless the boy was returned immediately, and a frustrated Cochise insisting that he didn’t have the boy and therefore couldn’t return him. Bascom then announced that he was taking Cochise and his family prisoner, at which point Cochise whipped out a knife, sliced through the side of the tent, and sprinted out of the camp with bullets whizzing around him.

Bascom still had Cochise’s wife and son hostage, so the Apaches attacked a wagon train, tortured eight Mexicans to death, and kidnapped four Americans as bargaining chips. However, Bascom stubbornly refused to make the trade unless the kidnapped boy was included. In a fury, Cochise slaughtered his hostages and retreated. After some consultation, the Americans hanged most of their own hostages and likewise retreated. The ensuing war lasted a decade and killed thousands.

2The Death Of Mangas Coloradas

The brutality of the war sparked by the Bascom Incident can be seen in the death of Mangas Coloradas. While the American Civil War raged, the Apaches drove white settlers out of most of southern Arizona. However, reinforcements began arriving as the war in the east wound down and it became clear that the Apaches couldn’t hold out forever. Cochise’s father-in-law, the great chief Mangas Coloradas, decided to try to negotiate peace.

When the chief rode up with a flag of truce, General Joseph West immediately had him arrested. He then took the guards aside and told them that the “old murderer . . . has left a trail of blood for 500 miles on the old stage line. I want him dead or alive tomorrow morning, do you understand? I want him dead.”

That night, the guards entered the room where the chief was being held, tortured him with red hot bayonets, scalped him with a cooking knife, and then shot him dead “while trying to escape.” The war would rage for several more years.

1Papa Nicetas

In 1870, four people settled in Labette County, Kansas, not far from where a young Laura Ingalls Wilder lived with her parents. They called themselves the Benders and claimed to be a family, although the exact nature of their relationship would later be questioned. Ma and Pa Bender spoke only German, but their children were fluent in English, and the family soon turned their one-bedroom shack into a small inn. They were rumored to practice magic, and Kate Bender became popular locally as a fortune teller and spiritualist.

In the years that followed, settlers began to vanish while traveling through Labette County. Body parts began to turn up in the countryside, but nobody knew who to blame. Eventually, the locals held a meeting and agreed to form a party to search every house in the area, but this was delayed by bad weather. When the party finally reached the Bender place, the family were long gone.

Underneath the bed, a trapdoor led to a secret basement, where the floor was stained with blood. Eight bodies were found buried in the garden, each with a cut throat and a smashed skull. The Benders were never found, and it’s unknown how many more victims they claimed over the years.

The Wild West of the late 1800s and the turn of the next century was a land with loose laws, big egos, and, of course, adventure. It attracted fiery individuals, with spirits as wild as the terrain, who left colorful pages in history. It was a place where rebellious women roamed free and pushed all the envelopes ever made for the fairer sex. These 10 women reveled in the freedom of the frontier and led lives in a way that still has us talking about them today.

10 Calamity Jane

Born: Martha Jane Cannary
Lived: May 1, 1852–August 1, 1903
Areas: Wyoming, Utah, Arizona

Calamity Jane is perhaps the most famous of the wild women of the West and for good reason. She pretty much did it all when it comes to the things that brought these women notoriety. She skillfully shot a gun, told tall tales, dabbled in prostitution, committed hefty crimes, and drank—a lot.

Besides her reputation as a drunken outlaw, Calamity Jane was known for her generous heart. She and her siblings were orphaned when Jane was 14, and she took it upon herself to care for them.

This responsibility helped to shape her into a true enigma.^[1] While one of her earliest-known careers was as a dance hall girl, she also became famous for wearing men’s clothing and riding alongside the roughest cowboys on whatever work or action she could find.

Jane ended up with a plethora of careers, including a short stint as a storyteller in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. However, none of these careers lasted long due to Jane’s unfortunate chronic alcoholism.

Like many of the notable characters from the Wild West, Jane was unashamed about telling a fib. She is known for being a sidekick of Wild Bill Hickok and bragged about their friendship until the day she died. However, many who knew them both said that Jane was, in fact, obsessed with Bill rather than having a true partnership or friendship with him.

Although she was buried next to him, his friends said at the time that the location of the burial was a joke on Hickok. He was rumored to have said that he had “absolutely no use” for Jane.

9 Big Nose Kate

Born: Maria Katalin Horony
Lived: November 7, 1850–November 2, 1940
Areas: Arizona, Texas

Known primarily for being the longtime companion of Doc Holliday, Big Nose Kate was an indomitable woman to be reckoned with.

Kate’s family emigrated from Hungary to Iowa when she was 10 years old. Tragically, the roughness of the frontier left Kate and her siblings orphaned only three years later. In true outlaw fashion, she ran away from her foster home at age 15 and became a stowaway on a riverboat headed for St. Louis.

She proceeded to dabble in various careers and move around until meeting Doc Holliday in Texas in 1877. History, in fact, would not be the same without Kate, as she was the one who introduced Doc Holliday to Wyatt Earp.^[2] Kate and Doc moved to Tombstone, Arizona, with Wyatt and his brothers in 1880, and the rest is history.

Her legacy continues to this day. A Tombstone saloon named in her honor is still one of the best cowboy bars in the entire area.

8 Poker Alice

Born: Alice Ivers
Lived: February 17, 1851–February 27, 1930
Areas: Colorado, South Dakota

Perhaps even more than today, the Wild West was a place where women were given permission to experiment with careers not normally seen as fit for women. Alice Ivers embraced a career as a poker player, a profession still largely dominated by men.

Alice was born in England to conservative parents in 1851. Her father had the wanderlust bug of the age and relocated the family to Colorado. Alice seems to have caught the ailment herself as she fled her family at a young age to marry her first husband, Frank Duffield. This bold act would change the course of Alice’s life forever as Frank was a poker enthusiast, to say the least.

Preferring to accompany her husband out at night, she sat at the tables behind him while he played. When he died in a mining accident a few years into the marriage, Alice took up gambling^[3] herself. This led to another interesting Wild West crossover: She made big bucks playing at a bar in Colorado owned by Bob Ford, the man who killed Jesse James.

Alice was known to use her skills to finance a lavish lifestyle and made a show of heading to New York City with large earnings to stock up on the couture fashions of the day. She was also exceptionally shrewd as a professional gambler. It is widely believed that she married her last husband rather than pay off a large gaming debt she owed him.

Humorously, it is reported that Alice refused to play on Sundays despite her nontraditional ways. However, she was still arrested several times for running girls, bootlegging, and public drunkenness.

7 Belle Starr

Born: Myra Maybelle Shirley
Lived: February 5, 1848 – February 3, 1889
Areas: Missouri, Texas

Belle Starr was destined to live a life rubbing shoulders with notable outlaws. She was childhood friends with both the James brothers and the Younger brothers (of the Younger Gang), all native to Missouri. All the families eventually ended up in Texas, where their bonds were strengthened.

In time, Belle married a Cherokee man named Sam Starr who was addicted to a life of crime and could not tolerate traditional employment. During their marriage, Belle became skilled as an organizer for local cowboy gangs, providing refuge for fugitives, bootleggers, and thieves. She was well-known for her class, always riding sidesaddle and in her best black velvet. Belle loved the outlaw life and only quit after Sam was gunned down.

She lived the rest of her life attempting to have less notoriety. Her cause of death, two days before her 41st birthday, remains a mystery with several colorful theories.

At the time, it was reported that Belle was ambushed^[4] on her way home from a neighbor’s house late at night. Some believe that she had come from a dance and was killed by a rebuffed attendee with whom she had refused to dance. Still others believe that it was her own son who committed the murder in a fit of adolescent rage.

6 Sally Scull

Born: Sarah Jane Newman
Lived: c. 1817–Unknown Date of Death
Areas: Texas

Sally Scull loved to shoot, loved to intimidate those around her, and loved to marry. She perhaps attracted so many suitors because she intrigued everyone she met. She played poker, was a good shot, and could ride a horse. Sally could also lasso as well as any man and better than many. She combined this with a strong taste for men and must have been a striking and unforgettable woman to encounter.

Sally learned to be brave, bold, and fierce as a young girl growing up in Comanche territory. One famous story recalls her mother chopping off the toes^[5] of a local Native American who was trying to break into their home. By the time the family moved to Texas a few years later, Sally had learned to be a quick draw and a skilled horsewoman.

Sally became famous for her skills as what we now call a cowgirl. But her legacy has perhaps survived because of her five husbands and her involvement in the deaths of two of them. In one instance, Sally reportedly fired in shock at her current husband after he poured ice water over her head to wake her one morning.

In another case, her husband and the horse on which he was riding met their deaths when a strong river current overcame them. Rather than expressing any grief, Sally famously said that she wished her husband’s belt buckle had been saved so she could retrieve the $40 it was worth.

Given her abilities and knowledge of the area, Sally was the perfect person to help the Confederacy during the Civil War. She seems to have stayed busy and profited from transporting cotton during those years.

Following the war, her trail runs cold. It is not even known when or how she died. Had she been born a decade later, she could have built a career as an outlaw or frontierswoman. Nonetheless, she still left quite a legacy.

5 Laura Bullion

Lived: October 1876–December 2, 1961
Areas: Texas, Tennessee, Missouri

The apple didn’t fall far from the tree with this wild woman. Laura Bullion came from a family who lived on the edge. Her father was a bank robber who was friends with Wild Bunch gang member Ben Kilpatrick (aka “The Tall Texan”), and her uncle was a train robber. Needless to say, her family life was less than stable and she left home at age 15 to make her own way.

As with many infamous female outlaws of this age, Laura started her career of crime as a prostitute. Sadly, she began very early and retired around age 17 when she transferred to robberies with Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch. She was likely welcomed into the group because of her father’s connections, and she did, in fact, become romantically involved with Kilpatrick for a time.

Laura is known to have participated in many heists^[6] with the Wild Bunch. She is believed to have been involved with many more because she often dressed in men’s clothing and may have gone unrecognized. As with many other outlaws, Laura retreated into a life of traditional employment and a low-profile existence after she was released from prison.

Perhaps most notably, prior to her death, Laura was one of only three people believed to know the true identity of Etta Place, a secret that she happily took to her grave.

4 Etta Place

Lived: 1878–Unknown Date of Death
Areas: Utah, Argentina, California

No list of female Wild West outlaws would be complete without at least a mention of Etta Place, the mysterious companion to Harry Longabaugh (aka “the Sundance Kid“). The two were so devoted to each other that she was the only person to flee the country with him and Butch Cassidy and the only woman to stay with a member of the Wild Bunch as long as she did. At the same time, few people from recent history can claim such notoriety and mystery.

Despite Etta being one of the only women to have penetrated the inner circle of the gang and stay with them long-term, little is known about her life before or after her relationship with Longabaugh. It is widely believed that she met the Sundance Kid while working as a prostitute, possibly in Utah, and that the two eventually became devoted companions. When Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid escaped to South America in 1901, Etta was at their side.^[7]

There are at least half a dozen theories about Etta after she parted ways with Longabaugh, most of them involving Etta living as a prostitute or outlaw. It is known that she lived in San Francisco in 1907, at least for a little while, but the trail runs cold after that. Estimations about her date of death range from 1922 to 1966. Now that’s one wild woman with a talent for mystique!

3 Pearl Hart

Born: Pearl Taylor
Lived: 1871–Unknown Date of Death
Areas: Missouri, Arizona

The success of train robbers in the Wild West was lucrative but short-lived. Pearl Hart, besides earning a name as a female gang member, is also famous for being involved in the last of such recorded robberies.

Pearl was a true rebel. Born into a well-to-do family, she eloped at age 16 with an abusive alcoholic with whom she had an on-again, off-again relationship until 1893. Then she discovered Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and became infatuated with the cowboy life.

In 1898, she ended up in Phoenix running a tent brothel. When the nearby mine closed, she and a male cohort decided to rob a stagecoach for funds. She cut her hair short and dressed in men’s clothing to commit the crime.

The pair was quickly arrested and ultimately acquitted. (Pearl’s passionate plea to the jury that she needed the money to care for her elderly mother actually worked.) But she was arrested^[8] and convicted a short time later for mail tampering.

Pearl had evidently learned a thing or two about using her female charms to her advantage. She used her notoriety to finagle a comfortable stay during her five years in prison. Not only was she granted a comfy mountainside suite, it came complete with an outdoor yard. She was also allowed to visit with the public and pose for photos (for which she received compensation).

Pearl was pardoned in 1902. While the reasons remain unknown, many believed that it was because she became pregnant and the authorities wanted to keep the circumstances secret. She was given a ticket to Kansas City, Missouri, and proceeded to dabble in various careers, even going full circle and working anonymously as a storyteller for Buffalo Bill’s show.

2 Fannie Porter

Lived: February 12, 1873–January 1, 1940
Areas: San Antonio

When it came to the famous outlaws of the Wild West, Fannie Porter rubbed shoulders with them all. However, it was not as a fellow outlaw or lover that she knew them. It was because she owned a brothel that most of them frequented over the years.

As with many of the frontier women who dabbled in prostitution, Fannie started her career at a young age—15 years old. By age 20, she had already become known for her business acumen as a high-end brothel owner, running one of the cleanest, safest, and classiest establishments in Texas.

Fannie didn’t just supply outlaws with short-term company. Many of her “girls,” as she referred to them, became lovers and companions to the most famous Wild West figures.

Until becoming the girlfriend and accomplice to Kid Curry, Della Moore worked at the brothel. She returned after the relationship ended. Lillie Davis was a companion to Will “News” Carver of the Wild Bunch and claimed to have even married him before he died.

Most famously, the mysterious Etta Place is believed by many to have met the Sundance Kid while she was working for Fanny (rather than in a brothel in Utah). However, this has not been confirmed.

As the outlaws disappeared into obscurity and the Golden Age of the Wild West came to an end, Fannie also faded from the public eye. Some say she retired rich,^[9] some say she married rich, and some say she returned to England to live well. Whatever the case, many famous outlaws have her to thank for introductions of the most provocative type.

1 Lottie Deno

Born: Carlotta J. Thompkins
Lived: April 21, 1844–February 9, 1934
Areas: Texas, New Mexico

Born Carlotta J. Thompkins, this wild woman was so skilled at poker that she was eventually given the name “Deno,” which was a shortened version of dinero (“money”). Unlike many women who made names for themselves living on the edge of the law during this time, Carlotta was from a wealthy family and from parents who gave her ample care and affection.

She learned to play cards by spending time with her father, a successful gambler and horse breeder. After he was killed in the Civil War, Lottie began her own career at the poker table.^[10]

She quickly added fugitive-companion to her resume when she fell in love with Frank Thurmond, also a professional gambler. He was accused of murder, and the two of them went on the lam, happily using poker to support their lifestyle.

The pair ended up in Fort Griffin, a quintessential cowboy town, and became friends with Doc Holliday. Fearful of being caught, Lottie and Frank hid their relationship until they were married years later. In Fort Griffin, Lottie’s fame grew as a poker player who was not to be challenged. She became the subject of songs, paintings, novels, and numerous short stories.

Lottie and Frank were a couple with their eyes on the big picture. They eventually married in 1880, used their savings to invest in a number of legit businesses, and settled in New Mexico. There, they became leaders in their community. Their later life found Frank as the vice president of a bank and Lottie as the cofounder of a hospital.

Janice Formichella is an American-born traveler of the world currently residing in Bali, Indonesia. She loves history, gin, girl talk, her bullet journal, and a good list. You can follow Janice and her adventures on Twitter and on Instagram.

Have you ever heard a story about how a different actor was almost cast in an iconic role played by someone else? Like how Will Smith could have been Neo in The Matrix or how Eric Stoltz was first cast as Marty in Back to the Future? There are hundreds of examples, and it makes for some fun movie trivia. 

Less well-known than the actors we missed are the subplots. Sometimes a story gets cut down for time, or because the studio didn’t like a certain part, or because something just doesn’t work.  Here are some of the most incredible subplots we never got to see.

10. Tommy Wiseau’s The Room Had a Vampire Subplot Removed

Tommy Wiseau’s The Room is infamous for its badness. It’s so bad that another movie was made about making the movie just to explain the whole fiasco. People have watch parties just to watch Wiseau’s awkward vision unfold in all its glory and if you haven’t seen it, it’s hard to explain just how poorly the whole thing comes together.

Wiseau not only starred in the movie, he wrote and directed it. The result is a cult classic of “so bad it’s good” nonsense, but we almost had so much more. Co-star Greg Sestero said that Wiseau’s original plan was for his character to be a vampire. 

Nothing in the movie lends itself to the idea that anyone should or could be a vampire, but nothing in the film really lends itself to anything that makes sense, so maybe it’s not a big deal. That said, the vampire subplot would also have included a scene in which Wiseau’s character flew away in a car because, for him, vampires have flying cars. 

9. A Trans Character’s Storyline Was Cut from Paper Mario

In the incredibly vast universe of Mario games, Paper Mario is a sort of subset of games that are part puzzle, part RPG, and can be a lot of fun to play. The first Paper Mario dates back to the N64 in the year 2000 and they are still being made. The series could be considered groundbreaking for a transgender subplot in the Japanese version that was cut from the English language release.

In the gameplay, you befriend a former villain named Vivian. She’s part of a group of sisters but she’s the bullied one and, as an outcast, joins Mario at a time when he’s an outcast. 

In the Japanese version, you can use a skill that gives you a description of Vivian which says she “appears to be a girl but is really a boy.” At one point in the game when Vivian gets into a fight with her sisters, one calls her a man. She also goes on to say she is a woman now and proud of her transformation. So, for a 2004 game deemed acceptable for children in Japan, it was pretty progressive.

The English translation for Western audiences lost all of this and the character’s status is never really relevant at any point.

8. The Godfather Left Out a Bizarre Subplot About the Size of Sonny Corleone’s Genitals

Considered by many to be one of the greatest movies ever made, The Godfather was based on a book and that’s where most of the story comes from. As with any book-to-movie adaptation, some things had to be cut to make a coherent story that was not 12 hours long. One subplot that didn’t make the grade was the very bizarre subplot about the size of Sonny Corleon’s nether region.

It’s hard to talk about this in a way that doesn’t sound both offensive and entirely made up, but there’s a whole section of the book in which the character Lucy Mancini misses Sonny because of his “manly stature.” And this is compounded by the fact that author Mario Puzo decided to include details about Lucy’s dimensions. He was very obsessed with this idea. 

It’s not a one-off either. This is consistently mentioned throughout Sonny’s story. Puzo was really obsessed with it and obsessed with the women in his book who were obsessed with it. 

7. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles Had a Cheating Subplot

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is a classic comedy and one of the few Thanksgiving movies that people watch every single year. Steve Martin and John Candy are brilliant together and the film provides a lot of laughs. It also includes one quick but weird scene.

When Martin’s character returns home and his wife finally meets John Candy’s Del she seems very emotional, almost on the brink of tears. Arguably she was just relieved to see her husband, but there’s a longer cut of the movie that makes this scene more logical. 

In the original script, there was a subplot in which she’s worried that her husband is with another woman, that Del is not a man at all and that he’s having an affair. The only remnant of this in the movie most of us saw is that relief on her face when she sees him for the first time. 

6. James Gunn’s Scooby-Doo Had a Lesbian Subplot 

Scooby-Doo has been a staple of children’s entertainment since back in 1969. And since that time it’s also been mired in jokes about just what’s in those Scooby Snacks that Shaggy eats, not to mention potential relationships between characters. While many people speculated a Fred and Daphne romance, there was a long speculated subtext that Velma might be a lesbian.

Was she written that way intentionally? Who’s to say, unless you mean in the more modern iterations when yes, Velma was very explicitly and intentionally written that way. In fact, James Gunn’s movie from 2002 may have kicked off the intentional story when he wrote a lesbian subplot for the character that was later axed from the movie. 

According to Gunn, the subplot was watered down by the studio, then edited out, and then she was given a boyfriend in the sequel.

5. House of 1000 Corpses Was Supposed to Have a Skunk Ape Subplot 

Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses was the horror movie director’s first foray into film, and it’s still a memorable grindhouse-inspired horror classic that gets down and dirty. Among the many memorable scenes is a psychedelic dream sequence that briefly shows us something called a skunk ape.

The skunk ape is a cryptid sort of equivalent to Bigfoot, but more of a regional variety. The movie only gives us a brief glimpse of it and that’s it, but Zombie originally had bigger plans. He talks about it in the director’s commentary briefly, but the original script was said to have included a bit where the skunk ape shows up for real to wreak some havoc. Ultimately, it never made the grade. 

4. There Was an Epilogue to The Shining

The filming of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is the stuff of legends. Numerous articles have been written on the nightmare Shelly Duvall experienced and there’s even a documentary about the whole thing. There are so many good, weird, or unbelievable stories. One that gets overlooked a lot is the actual story itself. Kubrick filmed an epilogue to the movie that was even released with the first cut of the film.

In the original cut, and still available to read in the screenplay, we find out that Danny and his mom are fine after the events at the Overlook, at least physically. They’re in a hospital recovering from the trauma they endured and, you know, that’s it. Nothing zany or spooky happens. Apparently, the intent was to let audiences know they were fine because Kubrick initially had a soft spot for the characters and thought audiences needed to know.

When Kubrick changed his mind about the scene he had to have it physically cut from the movie. That meant people went to the theaters in LA and New York that had prints and they used scissors to literally cut the scene out. Word is every copy was destroyed. 

3. The Movie Fantasia Cut an Evolution Sequence 

Disney’s Fantasia is beloved by many for its music and animation and the 1940 film contains a long evolution sequence that shows the origin of life up through the dinosaurs which is still very cool to watch. However, being the 1940s, the idea of evolution was still a touchy subject for a lot of people who chose faith over science and Disney could only get away with so much.

Originally, the evolution sequence was supposed to continue onward. It would go beyond the dinosaurs through the evolution of mammals and finally to the evolution of humans, the creation of fire, and all that good, Darwinian stuff. None of that made the final cut of the film, however. The early evolution parts stayed intact because this is just a musical and no one explicitly states anything about science. But the human parts were cut for fear of offending any fundamentalists who would protest the movie. 

It wasn’t just blind fear that made Walt Disney stop. According to animator John Hubley, Disney was threatened. Those fundamentalists, who would have wielded quite a bit of political and business clout at the time, made sure Disney knew they didn’t want humans connected to evolution. Disney was already concerned the movie would have a hard time gaining acceptance, so he bowed to their threats and cut the evolution. 

2. Zootopia Involved Predators Being Forced to Wear Shock Collars

Zootopia is a fun animated movie about a world full of anthropomorphic animals doing all the sorts of mundane jobs people do in the real world. The story follows a character named Judy who’s a cop and also a rabbit. Hijinks ensue. But the original plan for this movie was much darker.

Originally, Nick Wilde was going to be the main character and Judy would come in later. Nick, and all predators in Zootopia, was set to wear a shock collar that suppressed his predator instincts. Whenever a predator expressed a negative instinct, they’d get zapped. There’s a scene that was never fully animated in which Nick and Judy witness a taming party in which a little bear is forced to wear a taming collar to be accepted into Zootopia.

Producers eventually decided this was much too dark, and the characters were unlikable so they tweaked the story, but early concept art still exists. 

1. Kangaroo Jack Was Filmed as an R-rated movie

Kangaroo Jack isn’t the most famous film in history by any means, but the PG-rated 2003 buddy comedy does have a solid 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes so even if you haven’t seen it, you can try to imagine what it might be like. 

The movie involves two friends trying to chase down a kangaroo that has accidentally made off with some mob money, something that likely happens all the time in Australia. The movie was once much different than the final cut leads us to believe, however. Star Jerry O’Connell once confirmed that the movie was originally R-rated and even included full-frontal nudity. It was supposed to be a crime-comedy like Midnight Run about low-level mob guys. And then the studio stepped in.

Apparently, test audiences were under the impression that, due to the wacky kangaroo in a jacket used in the promo material, it was going to be a family-friendly comedy for kids. Needless to say, people were unimpressed. Rather than change the film’s marketing, the studio recut the movie to be a family-friendly comedy. And, based on the critics’ response, it didn’t work.

The United States wasn’t the only untamed frontier. Just to the north was another Wild West: the vast, cold, unsettled lands of Canada.

The frontier days of the Great White North have never held the mythic status of the American frontier. They were emptier lands, filled, for the most part, with fur traders and First Nations tribes, kept on a tighter leash than the wild settlers across the border.

But as the Americans to the south started to expand further west, and as they began to be lured up north in pursuit of gold rushes, the Canadian West started to become every bit as wild as its neighbor. It turned into a place where liquor, theft, and murder ran rampant—and nothing but a handful of mounted policemen stood between civilization and complete anarchy.

10 The Fraser Canyon War

In the Canadian West, trouble usually traveled in from down south. In 1858, a mob of American prospectors surged into Fraser Canyon, desperate for their chance at gold. A few got rich, but the whole lot of them very nearly got themselves killed.

It started when a group of French miners grabbed and violently raped a woman from the local Nlaka’pamux tribe.^[1] The tribe was already uneasy about the new flux of white men into their land, and this set them over the edge. They caught the men who’d raped her, chopped off their heads, and, as a warning to the others, sent their mutilated bodies downriver to drift into the town where the prospectors lived.

The Americans were terrified, and they wanted blood. Some called for war, forming gangs that promised to “kill every man, woman and child they saw that had Indian blood in them”—which suited the Nlaka’pamux just fine. In their camp, the war chief was calling on his men to “make a clean sweep of the whole body of miners.”

Battles broke out across the island. When the Nlaka’pamux killed, they would send the mutilated bodies of their victims downriver. Soon, it became a common sight to see a headless body drifting downstream anywhere a man walked.

Things only calmed down when Governor James Douglas led a small army into the Nlaka’pamux camp and convinced them to make peace with the Americans. But it wasn’t easily done. The Nlaka’pamux only agreed because Douglas promised that, if they didn’t, he would send in the Canadian army to kill every last one of them.

9 The Cypress Hills Massacre

On a spring morning in 1873, a group of fighters from Alberta’s Piikani tribe rode down south of the border and into Idaho, looking for nothing but trouble. They found it in a group of American wolf pelt hunters. The Piikani men threatened them, stole their horses, and took them back to their camp.

They were sure the Americans would never pursue them across the border—but the Americans weren’t about to let their horses go. They gathered up a posse and rode into Canada in pursuit, looking for blood.

They soon made it to Cypress Hills, where they found a native camp. These weren’t the men who’d robbed them—they were peaceful people from the Assiniboine tribe—but to the Americans, every Indian looked the same. The posse came on them with guns cocked and loaded, determined to burn the natives out. The Assiniboine tried to take cover, but the Americans thought they were getting ready to fight and opened fire.

They made the chief watch as they jammed a hatchet into his father’s skull. Then they cut the chief’s head off and mounted it on a pole. By the time they were done, they’d killed 22 innocent people.^[2] Only three of the dead were men. All the rest were women and children.

8 Fort Whoop-Up

After the Cypress Hills Massacre, the Canadian government knew they had to do something to keep the Americans in line. They formed a police force and sent them out on a long march west. They were called the North-West Mounted Police—or, as they’re better known today, the Mounties.

Their first target was Fort Whoop-Up, a trading post where two Americans were making a small fortune by illegally selling whiskey and weapons to natives in the Blackfoot Confederation. Their trademark drink was called bug juice, a liquor spiked with ginger, molasses, red peppers, and chewing tobacco, and the Blackfoot would trade everything they had for it.^[3]

“The whiskey brought among us by the traders is fast killing us off,” the Blackfoot chief Crowfoot complained. His people were giving away their food and clothes to get drunk, and they didn’t know how to handle it. Blackfoot men had murdered each other at Fort Whoop-Up, carried away by the booze. Crowfoot had relocated his tribe to get them to stop drinking, but whiskey runners would follow them wherever they went, knowing that, whether Crowfoot liked it or not, his people were loyal customers.

Ultimately, nothing ever happened to the men who ran Fort Whoop-Up. When the Mounted Police arrived, they just threw out the whiskey, and, without evidence, the whiskey runners couldn’t be stopped. The two Americans died free and wealthy beyond most people’s wildest dreams.

7 Jerry Potts

The men who’d founded Fort Whoop-Up didn’t get there on their own. They were helped by a guide: the half–Black Elk, half-Scottish scout Jerry Potts. He got them started—and after their whiskey started destroying his life, he became their worst nightmare.

Potts was a child when he killed his first man. His victim was the man who’d killed his father: a Piikani warrior who’d left him an orphan. It filled Potts with hate, and when he was 16 years old, he hunted the Piikani man down and killed him.^[4]

He saw the effect of Fort Whoop-Up firsthand shortly after he helped set it up. A man in his tribe called Good Young Man got drunk on bug juice and, in a drunken rage, murdered his mother and his brother.

Potts, once more, dedicated himself to revenge. He spent the next year tracking down Good Young Man. As soon as Good Young Man saw Potts approaching, he tried to flee on horseback, but Potts shot him off his horse, killing him. From then on, Potts hunted whiskey runners.

At first, he would track them down and kill them. When the Mounted Police came in, Potts joined them and worked as their guide. But by then, he’d already killed 40 people, nearly every one a whiskey runner.

6 The McLean Gang

The McLean Gang had gotten cocky in 1879. They were four teenagers who thought they couldn’t be touched by the law. They lived out in Fort Kamloops, British Columbia, where they hardly ever saw a police officer. The boys would steal horses and ride through town, bragging about what they’d done, sure they were untouchable.

But a man named Johnny Ussher was determined to set them straight. He put together a posse, rode out to the McLeans’ home, and demanded they turn themselves in.

The McLean boys responded with a hail of bullets, but Ussher was sure they were just trying to scare the posse. The boys were thieves, not murderers, he thought. So he got off his horse, walked right up to them, and told them to put down their guns and come quietly.

The boys knocked him down and kicked him while one shouted, “Kill the son-of-a-b—ch!” When nobody else did it, the youngest of the group, 15-year-old Archie McLean (pictured above), pulled out his revolver and shot Ussher.

The other boys got the bloodlust after that. They filled Ussher’s body with bullets, mutilated him, and rode into town and showed off his bloodstained clothes. If anyone came for them, they declared, they’d be next to die.

Another group did come—but this time, there were 75 of them, and they were armed to the teeth. The McLean boys were brought in and hanged. The judge, ordering their deaths, declared the boys had “not one single redeeming feature.”^[5]

5 Bill Miner: The Gentleman Bandit

Bill Miner was born in Kentucky, but he didn’t stay there for long. He went out west and became an outlaw. Then, after a long stint in San Quentin prison, he moved on north, hoping criminal business would be easier in the Canadian West.

They called him the “Gentleman Bandit” because of the polite courtesy he’d use when he was holding a gun to people’s heads.^[6] He was a man of firsts. It’s said he was the first to yell “Hands up!” during a robbery, and he was the first man to hijack a Canadian train.

The first train he robbed won him $7,000 in gold. At the time, that was enough of a fortune to live comfortably for two years. When the money ran out, though, he tried to pull off the trick again in 1905—and this time, it didn’t go as well.

The second train he robbed had nothing in but mail and old newspapers. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, Miner grabbed $15 and a bottle of liver pills and then ran for his life. He didn’t get far. The Mounted Police tracked him down, shot one of his cohorts in the leg, and brought Miner in. The Gentlemen Bandit was behind bars. He’d risked it all and lost it for $15 in cash.

Miner later escaped prison and fled to the US.

4 Sam Kelly And The Nelson-Jones Gang

When Sam Kelly and his gang terrorized a town, you had to catch them quick. As soon they’d appeared, the boys would disappear into the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan: a place full of caves, cliffs, and gullies. In a second, Kelly and his men would disappear into a winding network of tunnels and vanish.

Kelly started his criminal career with a trek down to Montana, where some old friends were being held in prison. With a copy of the jailhouse key given to him by the town’s corrupt deputy sheriff, Kelly was able to walk right into the prison and leave with the prisoners. He even tipped his hat to the sheriff’s wife as he walked out with two convicted felons.^[7]

From then on, Kelly was a career criminal. He would steal horses and cattle from Saskatchewan farms or sometimes move south of the border and hijack a train full of gold. He caused so much havoc that the Mounted Police set up a fort in the Big Muddy Badlands to try to stop him, but he disappeared every time.

After years of crime, Kelly had a change of heart. He walked into the police station and turned himself in. Kelly, though, had been so careful that they didn’t have enough evidence to convict him in of a single crime. Even though he’d brought himself in, they had to set him free.

3 James Gaddy And Moise Racette

In 1887, James Gaddy and Moise Racette met in a bar in Saskatoon. Bonding over a few beers and a mutual love of ill-begotten goods, the boys made a pact to become horse thieves. They even got a photograph taken together to commemorate the occasion.

They celebrated by stealing a horse from a man named Hector McLeish, but McLeish, they soon learned, wasn’t a good person to cross. He formed a posse and went out looking for the boys, determined to bring them to justice.

It didn’t take long before McLeish and a friend, Constable Mathewson, found the boys’ home. They sent word to the rest of the posse. The plan was to wait for backup before doing anything rash—but when they saw Racette saddling his stolen horse like he was getting ready to leave, the men jumped into action on their own.

What they didn’t know was that Racette’s father was in the house, too. When he saw his son getting arrested, the elder Racette snuck out the back door and jumped Mathewson from behind, knocking his gun out of his hand.^[8]

McLeish tried to get Racette off, but Gaddy grabbed the pistol and shot him three times. The boys, now murderers, ran for the lives, but they forgot about one thing: that photograph they’d taken at the bar. The photographer had kept a copy, and by the next day, their faces were all over the country with a $500 bounty on their heads. The two were hanged in 1888.

2 Harry Wagner: The Flying Dutchman

Harry Wagner was a member of Butch Cassidy’s gang, but after Cassidy was taken in, he stole a ship and moved up north. He terrorized the bays of British Columbia, plundering them on a boat so quick and silent that it won him the nickname “the Flying Dutchman.”

Wagner, though, met his end one day in 1913 while robbing a general store. Two constables saw the light on in the window and went in, catching Wagner and his men in the act. A gunfight broke out. Wagner shot one of the constables and bit off the other’s thumb, but the last standing constable brought him down.

The officer soon realized he hadn’t just caught a petty crook—he’d caught an international criminal. Wagner’s gang was hunted down, and Wagner was sent to prison, where he met a crude end.

Before Wagner was hanged, the hangman told the crowd, “I’m out to establish a new world record.” He had a constable set his watch, dropped Wagner down as fast as he could, and yelled for the time. The first sound after Wagner breathed his last breath was a crowd applauding as his executioner announced: “Gentlemen, gentlemen! You have been privileged to witness 11 seconds clipped from the record.”^[9]

1 The Mad Trapper Of Rat River

Nobody knows where the Mad Trapper, Albert Johnson, came from. He was a mystery, a man without a past who’d simply shown up in the Yukon one day and started stealing furs from trappers.

After a few complaints had come in, an RCMP officer went to Johnson’s cabin to ask him questions. Johnson, though, didn’t say a single word.^[10] He just sat there, staring at the Mountie in a steely silence, no matter what the officer said.

The policeman came back with an arrest warrant, and, again, Johnson didn’t say a single word. This time, he just pulled out his gun and shot the officer.

A posse of Mounties and trappers went after him next. For three days, they fought him in a shootout, even dynamiting his roof off. Johnson somehow survived it all, though, and escaped in the camouflage of a blizzard.

Most figured he’d die in a few days. It was mid-winter and they were north of the Arctic Circle, but Johnson survived. For 48 days, he stayed ahead of the officers chasing him, hiding his tracks by climbing through mountain ranges and traveling with a herd of caribou.

On February 17, 1932, they finally found him at Eagle River, where he fought them off in one last gunfight. It was a final stand. The Mad Trapper died in the Arctic in a blaze of bullets—but not before shooting one more officer before he went down.

Sure, some children do sometimes go wrong for one reason or another, and do something so evil that the law simply has to intervene. These situations are tragic, and fortunately quite rare, but what isn’t rare is children misbehaving in general. There will always be kids who make the kinds of mistakes that kids do, but that doesn’t mean the adults always know how to handle it. In this list, we will explore 10 times that overreaction to childish behaviors led to arrests. 

10. A Florida 13 Year Old Was Once Arrested For Farting In Class 

Most of us have probably accidentally passed gas in an embarrassing way at least once, and had to excuse ourselves or act like it didn’t happen while looking properly chastened. We have probably also all either been, or witnessed, a class clown farting on purpose or making farting noises to annoy a teacher, especially a substitute. As long as school exists, there will be class clowns causing disruptions who think they are just the funniest people who has ever lived. 

Now, usually when a situation like this gets out of control, the teacher starts with threats, and eventually sends the offending student to the principal’s office. The student then has to accept school discipline for their behavior, and will have to hear about it from their humiliated parents later. This is why it is so strange that one time in a Florida school, it escalated much farther than that. A 13 year old boy was actually arrested for his disruptive passing of gas, and later even admitted to it, which led to charges of disrupting school function — Why the police needed to be called for simple criminal mischief involving an adolescent is a question that will probably never be answered satisfactorily. 

9. A 10 Year Old Boy Was Arrested For Public Urination 

It was a monumental bust when the police came across a young boy who was committing the crime of the millennium — he was caught urinating behind his mother’s car. This dastardly lawbreaker was quickly taken into custody for being so offensive to the public. The arresting officers made sure to harangue the disturbed youth to ensure that he never forgot what a horrible mistake he had made. 

You see, the officer who made the decision to arrest and scold the young boy felt that it doesn’t matter what age you are; clearly showing yourself off in public is a serious crime, and must be treated as one. His mother had been watching for him, and she was trying to help him avoid trauma, as we all know it is rather embarrassing for a kid to pee themselves, but the officers had no mercy. Fortunately, some sense prevailed as the arresting officer was dismissed, partly after video came to light showing him bring the 10 year old to tears over his “crime”. 

8. A Six Year Old Girl Was Arrested At School For A Tantrum 

Let’s face it, if there was camera footage going back to every humiliating moment from our pasts, probably all of us would have at least a few seriously mortifying toddler tantrums to look back on. Now, for most of us when these incidents occurred, at worst we got in a little trouble at kindergarten, or lost a privilege or something for our behavior. However, one time at an American school, a six year old girl was not only disciplined for throwing a childish tantrum, she was straight up arrested and taken away by the police. 

You see, the teacher was at their wits end because this tiny human had gone so far as to kick at someone, so, flummoxed by this incredible threat to their safety, they called the police. It turns out the same officer who thought it was appropriate to arrest a six year old girl had also arrested a six year old boy on the same day. He was later dismissed for this behavior. It is just as well, as the footage shows the officer was clearly out of line. He was there to help control the situation, not terrorize children. When the child started to settle down because of the officer that should have been the end of it, but he got completely carried away..

7. An Eight Year Old Boy Was Arrested For Hitting His Teacher 

Let’s be honest, even the biggest little kid is, well, still a little kid. So it’s hard to see an eight year old boy as much of a threat to a fully grown adult teacher, who should be able to handle a difficult situation. Unfortunately, at an American school an eight year old boy once got arrested due to a perfect storm of mistakes that really didn’t need to happen at all. You see, the eight year old in question had a substitute teacher that day, and was not getting along with them at all, to the point things were starting to escalate. 

As things got worse, the boy actually warned her not to come close or he would hit her. For some reason, the teacher, instead of deescalating with an eight year old, came close, and got punched in the chest. Showing all the tact and skill with children of a blunt ax, she called in the police, who arrested the eight year old boy for being defiant despite leaving no injury on his teacher. The worst part is it turns out that the boy was listed as being part of a special needs program, had been diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, ADHD, depression, and anxiety — he was on medication for all of this. 

6. An Eight Year Old Boy Was “Arrested” Over Potato Chips 

Many of us have been good and neve even tried to shoplift, but a fair amount of people have probably erred in their lives, especially as little kids, and stolen a small item or two. Most people probably feel bad about this, but would hope that if they had got caught, the adults around wouldn’t treat you like you had just killed someone. You’d like to imagine that if you got caught up in such a situation as a kid and made a mistake like that, the people who caught you would make sure the punishment fits the crime. 

This is why a citizen witness with a camera found it so strange when police were oddly combative to questions, and bullying to an eight year old boy, over the theft of a bag of potato chips. He was led away weeping, thinking he was being fully arrested and taken to jail over petty theft of a bag of chips. The police claim once they had him in the car, away from the citizen’s camera,  they told the boy they were taking him home, and did not actually arrest him. They also claim he had “priors” and thus they had a right to be mean to him. However, there is a term for what they did and it is called a mock arrest, which can (and surely is) pretty traumatizing for a small child.

5. 11 High School Students Got Arrested At Once For A Massive Hallway Brawl 

Let’s start off by noting that, unlike farting in class or throwing a tantrum, looking to cause physical harm to someone else is certainly worthy of repercussions. Still, many people have been in at least one fight, or at least a tussle, in their time at school. Kids are not always the best behaved people, and when you put that many of them together all day, several days a week, with little adult supervision in the hallways, things are going to happen. Most of the time, when people get caught, it just leads to suspension from school, and if repeated, eventual expulsion. However, one time in an American high school things went totally off the rails. 

In this instance, 11 high school students, in the middle of the afternoon, started fighting in the hallways, likely as some kind of group disagreement between two cliques of friends. The fight involved so many people that the school decided the police arresting everyone was the only solution, in their view, that made sense. Rather than suspending students, they went the full nuclear option. Now, arresting all of them may have been a bit much, but it made sense for at least one of the students. One of the highlights of the fight included a female student pushing a deputy so she could get to another female student she wanted to keep fighting with.

4. Kids Get Arrested For Participating In School Food Fights

We all know the scene from multiple kids movies. Someone throws food at someone, and someone else yells “food fight,” a few more people throw stuff. The rest of the people get angry, or shrug, and decide they might as well start in, and on it goes. The principal eventually walks in and blows a whistle, causing everyone to immediately stop, and stare in dread as they realize they are about to be punished. And, as we know, punishment always comes. Kids are suspended, their  parents are called, and the parents tack on more punishment. 

However, in some American states, they take it a bit more seriously than just a suspension and a call to your mom. After a food fight in Texas, 10 students were charged for their part in starting it, and were given the very serious criminal charge of inciting a riot. Now, the state of Illinois is not quite as strict, but when it comes to mass juvenile arrests over throwing food, they’ve got Texas beat, just in terms of sheer numbers. At a food fight at a charter school in Chicago, 25 students were arrested for their participation and were charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct.

3. A 16 Year Old Boy Was Arrested For Jaywalking 

A 16 year old California boy was lucky to be alive after an encounter with police where he was treated to an amount of excessive force that even some of the most authoritarian officers would be ashamed of. You see, the police felt that the teen needed to be dealt with as a very serious criminal with as many cops as they could scramble, as he was a very dangerous threat. They had caught the adolescent committing one of the worst crimes on the planet, and they needed to take it as far as the law would allow. 

The dastardly lad had jaywalked, which on a technical level, can also be considered trespassing in some situations. The officer felt full charges should be leveled against this dangerous African-American youth. When the juvenile was combative about being so forcefully charged and detained over something many of us have done with no consequence, backup was called. The story ends with the teen being slammed to the ground by four cops and arrested for resisting, and trespass, while five other cops look on. 

2. A 14 Year Old Boy Was Arrested For Hacking To Prank His Teacher 

Many of us have done something stupid where we’ve gotten on a sibling or friend’s computer and put a silly or embarrassing image as their wallpaper. It’s innocent kid stuff, and mostly considered a childish prank by all involved and all who witness it. It usually ends in a few cheap laughs, and maybe some harmless payback from the affected party. 

However, one time in an American school, a 14 year old boy’s prank was taken far more seriously than most of our childhood pranks ever were. The menacing youth committed the horrible crime of hacking into school computer systems so he could plant an image of two men kissing on the computer of a teacher he did not like. 

Now, you might think since real hacking was involved, a charge of criminal mischief might be in order, but instead they went ahead and charged him with a full felony cyber crime. Their argument for this is that he could have done something way worse like tampering with grades. Now, most people would likely argue that this same fact is actually in his favor, as he could have done way worse and just did innocent kid stuff. And hey, nothing wrong at all with the concept of police choosing to charge someone for something they might have done. Nope, that’s not a terrifying thought at all.

1. 12 Year Old Black Boy Chased Down, Spit Hooded, Arrested Over Begging 

The actions of the police here are such a farce it is how you would expect a Barney Fife-style cop from a comedy, who gets fired for going too far, to behave. The police saw a 12 year old Black boy running from a private security guard, and without being asked to intervene or having any idea if the kid had even done anything wrong, or had just angered a random security guard, joined in on the chase. Which, to a degree you might be able to understand, because if you see someone fleeing from security, as an officer you might at least want to intervene to find out what the hell is going on. But that’s not where this one ends.

Once they detained the boy, he was — unsurprisingly — combative for being detained by police with no evidence of wrongdoing, and spit at a female officer, to which a 12 year old found himself fitted with a spit hood. Now, some  may think this was warranted, but if the police had looked before they leapt, they would have realized it was the security guard who was committing a crime. You see, the security guard was actually trying to detain the boy because he was panhandling, which isn’t something a security guard can detain an adult for, much less a child.The parents, very understandably and justifiably, filed a lawsuit as they feel the police let racial biases allow them to take the wrong side in a situation without assessing it properly first.

When people list great civilizations of the past, they’ll often list the Roman Empire, Ancient Egypt, the Maya, the Incas, the Vikings, Mongols, and so on. Rarely do you hear much about the Indus-Valley civilization, also known as the Harappan civilization.

From around 3300 BC to 1300 BC, the Harappan people were some of the most advanced people in the world. In fact, many of their innovations were not rediscovered again for many generations. They were an amazing people who did some remarkable things.

10. They Mastered Flush Toilets

Toilets have a long and awful history. Their use and innovations have had many ups and downs. What you can be assured of is that the toilet was 100% not invented by a man named Thomas Crapper, Europeans did spend a long time using chamber pots, and the Indus-Valley civilization, thousands of years ago, had toilets that could flush and some fairly advanced plumbing and sanitation that would not be seen again anywhere in the world for many years. 

The level of sophistication that they employed was not seen again for over two thousand years when the Romans developed their own plumbing. Cities like Mohenjo-daro drew water from upwards of 700 wells. This provided homes with running water and even bathhouses throughout the town. All houses in the capital of Harappa had toilets connected to a public sewer system.

9. They Had Rudimentary Air Conditioning

Sanitation was far from the only advanced comfort of the Indus people. They had also developed an early and rudimentary form of air conditioning to keep themselves cool on those balmy days. Many homes had what were known as wind catchers installed. 

Still used in Iran today, wind catchers are essentially large stone chimneys. These pillars would rise above homes and redirect any breezes down through stone chambers into the homes below. Research has shown that a wind catcher can reduce the temperature in a home by as much as 10 degrees Celsius. On a hot day, that could mean going from 104 degrees Fahrenheit, all the way down to 86 degrees. Still a warm day, but not nearly as stifling.

8. The Indus Script Remains Undeciphered

Although the Indus people are long gone, we still do have a few relics of their civilization. From unearthed remains of great cities, we have also discovered the Indus script. Like other ancient languages, this one seems to be made up of symbols that represent thoughts or ideas, but there is no consensus on how simple or complex they may be. Does the script represent a proper language? Or are the symbols just showing general ideas? No one can say for sure.

Thousands of inscriptions have been unearthed, and they are all typically very short. Most are four or five symbols long. Not a single one has ever been translated. No one can even agree if it evolved into another modern language, either. Those who claim to have descended from the Indus Valley people can and sometimes do violently oppose any research that suggests their language did not evolve from this undeciphered one. There have been threats made against researchers in the past. 

Many scholars have tried to decipher the language over the years, but none of their attempts have been able to account for a full and reasonable translation. Some have been led to propose that the script is not a language at all. They believe the symbols are emblems and have general meanings, but not anything as precise and specific as a codified language.

7. They Really Liked Unicorns

Certain civilizations seemed to have been linked to certain mythological beasts in history; the kinds of creatures that we associated with the mythology of the people or the time. The minotaur is linked to Ancient Greece, and Chinese culture is replete with dragons. When you think of Ireland, you probably imagine leprechauns and fairies. For the Indus people, it was unicorns.

In many of the seals and symbols that have been uncovered in the area, unicorns are a common motif. They are the most common, in fact. 

It has been speculated that the creature depicted in the Indus images is a nilgai. That’s a kind of Asian antelope that is also known as a blue cow. But in real life, those animals have two horns. So the ones depicted by the Indus people, with their single horn, are very possibly a mythological version of the same creature and therefore in the same boat as a unicorn. 

The significance of the unicorn is not fully known. This is a result of the language issue. What any of the seals or inscriptions depicting unicorns say is still undecipherable, but since many of them also depict trees and plants, it may have something to do with harvests, farming, fertility, or associated themes. Until the script is deciphered, we’ll never know for sure.

6. They Invented Buttons

The button is one of the most ubiquitous and underappreciated things in the world. Everyone has buttons on coats and pants and sweaters, but rarely do we consider their origins. Like all things in the world, however, the button did have a beginning. That beginning was in the Indus Valley. 

If you head back to around 2000 BC, the first buttons ever discovered were in the Indus Valley. Archaeologists discovered ones made from curved shells. They were used as ornaments on the clothing of people who were either wealthy or of an important social status. Essentially, it was a very old-school way to flex your social position and wealth.

Buttons were drilled, because they did have primitive drills at the time, and attached to clothing with thread. They were also applied in geometric patterns, so something more like rhinestones or sequins in terms of their function. As a fastener for clothes, it was not used for some years.

5. They May Have Invented Dice Games

Any fan of tabletop gaming likely has a collection of dice that they use and are oddly proud of. Fans of craps or Yahtzee probably have a few extra dice around the house as well. The Indus Valley may have been where all of that started.

Excavations of the city of Harappa turned up a six-sided cubical die. It had dots on every side from one to six and looked for all the world like any die you would find in a modern board game. The only difference is how the dots are laid out. On a modern die, opposite sides always add up to 7. So the 6 dots are opposite the 1, the 5 is opposite 2, and the 4 is opposite 3. On the Indus die, 1 is opposite 2, 3 is opposite 4, and so on. Many additional dice were found in the city of Mohenjo-daro. 

The dice seemed to have been used in pairs, and examples found together were precisely the same size. That means they were clearly designed with some skill and effort. 

4. They Had the World’s Oldest Public Pool

There are over 300,000 public pools in the US alone. People just really dig swimming and they’ll take it any way they can get it. This is definitely not unique to modern times. The Indus Valley city of Mohenjo-daro was home to the world’s oldest public pool.

Known as the Great Bath, the pool dates back around 5,000 years. It wouldn’t be all that impressive by modern standards, the pool only measured about 39 feet by 23 feet. It was also under eight feet deep. The fact they could have constructed a waterproof tank to hold it was impressive on its own, but so is the fact it’s been extremely well preserved after all this time. 

Today the pool is a World Heritage Site, but it’s still not fully known what the purpose of the pool may have been. Of course, it could have just been for leisure time swimming, but it’s part of a larger citadel. The pool may have had a purpose in religious ceremonies of some kind. It’s possible the building was even a home for priests who used the bath. 

3. They Had Advanced Dentistry

Few people are more hated in the modern world than the dentist. We all need to go to a dentist at one time or another, we all understand the importance, and they never seem to be all that cruel or malicious. Nonetheless, people hate them. The dentist is an objectionable experience that makes you feel awkward and judged and often results in mild discomfort at best and pain at worst. Now try to imagine the very first dentists in the Indus Valley civilization and how well-regarded they must have been.

The dental drill, the most feared of all dental tools, was an innovation of the Indus Valley. They could drill holes in beads and buttons, and this technology was carried over to the science of dentistry. The drill itself would have been a primitive bow drill and the dentist was likely a bead craftsman. 

Eleven teeth belonging to nine individuals dating back somewhere between 7,500 and 9,000 years show evidence of drilling. Because of the wear on the teeth and the drill holes archaeologists were able to determine that the teeth were not drilled after death, this was a procedure done to a living patient who continued to use their teeth afterward.

Whether the procedure helped fix any cavities or whether they had any kind of effective anesthetic is not known. 

2. Their Disappearance is a Mystery

One of the most incredible things about the Indus Valley Civilization is the fact that it ended and no one knows why. Most great civilizations leave behind a good deal of historical evidence and records of their rise and fall. This didn’t happen for the Indus people. 

It wasn’t until 1920 that the city of Harappa was first uncovered and we began to learn about the civilization and its incredible advancements. And while we know how long they lasted in the world from about 3300 BC to 1300 BC, what caused the end of such a remarkable civilization is obscured.

There are plenty of guesses as to what happened, of course. There is evidence that space was becoming an increasing concern. Homes were built on top of homes. Trade routes to Mesopotamia were likely suffering as well, thanks to upheaval in that part of the world. 

Other possibilities include war or natural disaster. One of the most widely accepted beliefs is that a changing world is what brought an end to the civilization. Climate and geography both changed over the years. The Indus River may have changed course and led to extensive flooding. Since the river was life not just in terms of providing water but also trade, it would have been devastating.

Other rivers may have dried up at the same time and that cou;d have led to widespread disease and famine. The people of the Indus Valley would have had to migrate elsewhere or die. 

1. They Had No Weapons or Army

One of the theories about how the Indus Valley Civilization disappeared is that they were invaded by a foreign army. This idea is generally not accepted, and the archaeological evidence found so far does back this up. As near as we can figure, the Indus people did not have an army.

There seems to be no evidence of a standing army in the entire civilization. No weapons were left behind, no armor, and no real signs of major conflict at all. The only depiction of battle that has been found in imagery shows a mythological scene with a goat-horned person with a tiger’s body.

While there did seem to be levels of wealth or notoriety in the Indus society, there was no King or royalty above the other people. There were no palaces, nor were there images of kings or emperors that we know of.

The society seems to have been one of widespread equality. There were no poor slums and opulent homes, all living places looked nearly identical. All citizens seemed to have the same opportunities and the same levels of comfort. It’s no wonder many modern thinkers have likened it to a Utopia.