People used to believe that the corpses of murder victims could identify their killers – sort of a zombie testimony. Courts all over Europe, up until the 19th century in some places, practiced a ritual called the bier-right. The bier-right… Read More ›
Ossuaries are buildings or containers where human skeletal remains are kept as way to reduce the space needed to store human remains. They are typically used in locales that need to re-use burial plots because space for graveyards is very… Read More ›
Taphophobia, or the fear of premature burial, reached a fever pitch at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century. One of the reasons for this was people realized that the methods doctors used to confirm death were… Read More ›
Frightening stories of people who were accidentally buried alive, also known as premature burial, have been repeated around fireplaces and reported in newspapers since the 18th century. True or not, these tales really scared a lot of people so families went to… Read More ›
According to legend, in the mid-14th century a heart-broken King Peter (Pedro) I of Portugal exhumed the corpse of his lover to have her posthumously crowned queen. The romantic scandals of European royalty could fill a library so it can… Read More ›
General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fought the Union’s Army of the Potomac, which was commanded by Major General Joseph Hooker, at the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia between April 30 and May 6, 1863. The Battle of… Read More ›
In 2003, a medical antiquities dealer sold an unusual item, a partial mummified body, to a private Canadian collector. This specimen only consisted of a partial skull, neck, and top of the torso, and measured 17.3 inches by 18.9 inches… Read More ›
Although the Suicide Squad is best known today as a movie about a fictional group of supervillains drafted by the government to undertake dangerous missions in exchange for commuted sentences, there was a real-life Suicide Squad at Caltech in the… Read More ›
Betsy Ross was a talented seamstress and upholsterer who was widely believed to have made the first American flag. She was also an 18th century entrepreneur who made supplies for the American soldiers during the Revolution and lost two of her… Read More ›
The morning of November 16, 1880, Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (1837–1900), a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, dissected the head of an executed murderer in his dark room within minutes of the man’s death. Kühne worked around the… Read More ›
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