Note: some graphic stories ahead including one about murder.
1. The existence of a middle age "punishment" device called a "Scold's bridle" — which was basically an iron muzzle that went into your mouth, pressed down on your tongue, and was meant to be very painful and traumatizing. According to the British Library, the Scold's bridle was "used to hurt and humiliate women whose speech or behavior was thought to be too offensive or unruly."
2. In 2013, a man in Florida was swallowed alive in the middle of the night by a 17-foot-wide SINKHOLE that had formed under his bedroom. Yes, his BED. ROOM. He was asleep at the time, and his brother tried to save him, but he was too late by the time he'd rushed in to help.
3. In 2008, a priest in Brazil tied himself to 1,000 balloons in an attempt at "cluster ballooning" (a form of ballooning where people are literally harnessed to a cluster of helium-inflated rubber balloons). He ended up floating out over the ocean and disappeared from contact. Although the priest had been equipped with all kinds of gear like a radio and a GPS tracking device, he was lost for months, and his corpse was eventually found in the ocean.
4. In the 1920s, Dr. Dican Hadjy Kabakjian and his family refined radium in the basement of their house in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania to supply doctors and hospitals with radium-tipped needles for cancer treatment. The radiation eventually killed them all — either through cancer, or in Dican's case, emphysema that was likely caused by the fumes. Interestingly (and horrifyingly), when Dican's body was exhumed for study in 1965, his skeleton registered the highest levels of radiation ever recorded in the human body.
5. The female Adactylidium mite — a small arachnid — is known for its highly unusual, and quite frankly, HORRIFYING life cycle that involves incest and matricide. (Read below for the exact details, if you dare!)
6. In 2013, a 20-year-old amateur football referee in Brazil was decapitated after he stabbed a player to death for "refusing to leave the pitch." The referee's actions basically instigated the crowd, causing many of them to rush the field and then dismember the referee's body in retaliation.
7. Some years ago, a CT scan revealed that a Buddhist monk had actually been mummified — more specifically, self-mummified — inside of a statue. This process of self-mummification involved the elaborate and difficult process of eating a special diet and drinking a poisonous tea so that the body would become too toxic to be eaten by maggots. The statue had been purchased by a private buyer at a market and initially brought to an expert for restoration when the surprising (and unsettling) discovery of the monk's body inside was made.
8. In 2004, three transplant recipients shockingly died after receiving organs from a donor who had been unknowingly infected with rabies. According to the CDC, "This [had] never happened before." After some laboratory tests, it was believed by experts that the donor had actually been infected by a bat.
9. In 2022, a man in San Diego died after driving his car into a parked car and inadvertently impaling himself in the neck with a knife that he'd been handling at the time. It was reported that "authorities found an open knife in the Lexus and a large amount of blood. At the hospital, doctors also discovered a stab wound in his neck."
10. In 2007, a 44-year-old French man was discovered to have been missing 90% of his brain. Speaking with CBC, Axel Cleeremans, a cognitive psychologist at the Université Libre in Brussels, explained, "He was living a normal life. He has a family. He works. His IQ was tested at the time of his complaint. This came out to be 84, which is slightly below the normal range. So, this person is not 'bright' — but perfectly, socially apt."
11. Ettore Majorana was an Italian theoretical physicist working in the early 1900s. He had worked with the likes of other famous physicists like Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. However, Majorana disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1938.
12. After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in 2011, 50 emergency workers volunteered to stay behind — exposing themselves to deadly levels of radiation — in order to prevent a full meltdown of the facility. Yahoo! News reported at the time, "The remaining workers inside the Daiichi plant are not going in blindly; they are experts in their field, and well versed in the health risks they're facing."
13. António Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist who invented the lobotomy — which is now considered one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine — was actually awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for this HIGHLY invasive and life-altering procedure.
14. Finally, this isn't a story so much as a WTF image that I find QUITE terrifying...the inside of an Arctic lamprey's mouth:
