12688. History Facts

English hatmakers used to soften the straw they plaited into hats by spitting on it.

12689. History Facts

In the 1800s, there were several cases of people being buried when not really dead. Terrible stories about opened coffins with scratch marks on the inside, and corpses with fingernails worn away by trying to escape, led to cautious people being buried with a system of warning bells fitted in the coffin which they could ring if they woke up.

12690. History Facts

During witchcraft trials in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, in 1692, 25 people were condemned to death on the flimsy evidence of a group of hysterical girls.

12691. History Facts

King Kokodo of the Congo ruled for three years after his death. His body was wheeled around in a box during this part of his reign…

12692. History Facts

Leather used to be cured with a mixture of dog and chicken faeces smeared on it for many months. The fat and rotting meat scraps were scraped off with a knife.

12693. History Facts

It is said that the cursed mummy of Egyptian princess Amen-Ra was on board the Titanic when it sank in 1912, killing 1,500 people.The mummy was being sent from the British Museum to the USA; only the lid of the mummy's coffin is still in the British Museum.

12694. History Facts

Bald Romans used to make a paste of mashed up flies and spread it over their heads in the belief that it would make their hair regrow. It didn't…

12695. History Facts

Ivan the Terrible of Russia punished a bishop by having him stitched into the skin of a dead bear and releasing a pack of hounds to hunt and kill him.

12696. History Facts

Instead of a hollow pumpkin with a candle inside, Celtic people are said to have used real human heads cut from defeated enemies to keep away ghosts and ghouls in the autumn.

12697. History Facts

Chimney sweeps used to have three baths a year – one in the spring, one in the autumn and one for Christmas.The rest of the time, they were covered in soot.

12698. History Facts

In the past, European women sometimes wore a tube filled with sticky tree sap around their necks or on animal fur.These were supposed to attract and trap any fleas on their bodies.

12699. History Facts

The earliest cosmetic surgery was practised by doctors in India who made fake noses for criminals who had their noses cut off as a punishment for their crimes.

12700. History Facts

If sheep grazed on pastures full of clover, shepherds sometimes had to puncture the stomachs of sheep with a sharp knife to release all the gases that built up inside them.

12701. History Facts

In the old days, a ‘whipping boy' used to sit next to a royal prince in lessons. If the prince made a mistake, or did something wrong, the whipping boy was punished instead of the prince.

12702. History Facts

In the Middle Ages a royal farter was employed to jump around farting in front of the king to amuse him.

12703. History Facts

In Africa, it was common to bend back springy saplings and tie them beneath the ears of someone about to be beheaded, so that the person's last sensation would be of their head flying through the air.

12704. History Facts

Until 1868, criminals could be transported from England – sent to Australia for seven or fourteen years – for even petty crimes. The youngest victim was a boy of nine, transported for stealing.

12705. History Facts

King Henry VIII of England, employed the death penalty more than any other English king in history.

12706. History Facts

A punishment used in China in the old days was for a prisoner to be kept in an iron cage with his head sticking out the top.The cage was too tall to sit in, and too short to stand up. Some prisoners were left to starve to death inside.

12707. History Facts

A common test for the guilt of a person accused of witchcraft was to throw them in a pond. If they floated, they were guilty and were executed. If they sank, they were innocent – but probably drowned.

12708. History Facts

At banquets, the Gauls used to award the legs of roast animals to the bravest warriors. Sometimes fights to the death resulted from the squabbles over who should get them.

12709. History Facts

Long ago, criminals would be hanged in a metal cage called a gibbet, or in chains, near the scene of their crime ‘until their bones rotted to nothing'.

12710. History Facts

In 1577, an outbreak of typhus in an Oxford jail killed 300 people – the judges, jury, witnesses and spectators at criminal trials.The prisoners, used to living in filthy conditions, all survived.

12711. History Facts

Vlad the Impaler used to entertain guests to dinner surrounded by the bodies of people he had executed, impaled on spikes.

12712. History Facts

During the French Revolution, large crowds watched public executions by guillotine and people would rush forward to try to collect blood dripping from the heads lifted to show the crowd. They would keep bloody handkerchieves as souvenirs of the outing.

12713. History Facts

In 1857, a group of Indian people who rebelled against the ruling British were strapped across the mouths of live cannons and blown to bits when cannon balls were shot through them.

12714. History Facts

People who killed themselves used to be buried at a cross-roads with a stake through their heart. It was thought that they couldn't go to heaven, and the cross-roads would confuse their ghost so that it couldn't find the way home to haunt anyone.

12715. History Facts

A trusted servant of William of Orange, a Dutch king of England, spent money the king had given him for clothes on pistols, which he used to shoot the king. As punishment, he had his flesh pulled off with red-hot pincers, his guts pulled out and his body cut into pieces.

12716. History Facts

In 1685, a wolf that terrorized a village near Ansbach in Germany was sentenced to be dressed in human clothing and hanged.

12717. History Facts

The first person to be found guilty of a crime on the basis of finger print evidence was an Argentinian woman who murdered her children in 1892. Her fingerprints were found in blood on a door frame.

12718. History Facts

In Ancient Babylon, a doctor who accidentally killed a patient had his hands cut off.

12719. History Facts

A punishment for an English woman who nagged her husband or gossiped too much was to wear a metal cage over her head called a ‘scold's bridle'. It had a spiked plate inside her mouth that would cut her tongue if she moved it to speak.

12720. History Facts

Inca women washed their hair in week-old urine, braided it, and then used more old urine to keep it in place.

12721. History Facts

The Chinchorro people of Chile mummified their dead 8,000 years ago.They cut off the arms and legs, removed and smoked the skin, strapped sticks to the bones and replaced all the soft parts with grass and ashes, then put the whole body back together and painted it.

12722. History Facts

During excavations at a circle of standing stones in Avebury, England, in 1938, archaeologists found the body of a man who had been crushed under a falling stone in the 1320s when villagers tried to bury the stones.

12723. History Facts

Over 100,000 people have been tried for witchcraft in Europe since 1100, most of them tortured and eventually executed.

12724. History Facts

It is reported that during Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 some soldiers cut open dead horses and sheltered inside them to avoid freezing to death.

12725. History Facts

Some Stone-Age people believed the spirit could only escape when the flesh had gone from the body, so they left corpses to rot or be eaten by wild animals, or hacked off the flesh, before burying them.

12726. History Facts

As well as people, the ancient Egyptians mummified all kinds of animals including cats, crocodiles, birds – even fish and dung beetles.

12727. History Facts

At the Aztec festival celebrating Xipe Totec – the Aztec god of spring – prisoners of war were flayed alive.Their skins were then worn ceremonially by priests to represent the renewal of earth and the start of new life in spring.

12728. History Facts

People of the North American Sioux tribe used to make an amulet of their own, dried umbilical cord – the cord which connects the unborn baby to its mother's body – which they thought guaranteed a long life.

12729. History Facts

A 1,000-year-old grave in England was found to contain a rich woman in a coffin beneath a poor woman pinned down by a big stone. She was probably a slave, buried alive to serve the rich woman after death.

12730. History Facts

In the 1700s, the penalty for wearing tartan or playing the bagpipes in Britain was death.

12731. History Facts

The ancient Britons used to practise euthanasia by jumping off cliffs to their deaths. If individuals were too elderly to jump they would be pushed!

12732. History Facts

Anglo-Saxon parents were allowed to sell children up to the age of seven to be slaves ‘if they needed to do so'.

12733. History Facts

A lhasa apso dog was once imprisoned and kept on death row in a prison in Washington, USA, for over eight years for biting.

12734. History Facts

For nearly 1,000 years, Chinese women had their feet bound to keep them small. The toes were bent underneath, breaking all the bones, and the feet were kept tightly bandaged from childhood until death. The practice was banned in 1911.

12735. History Facts

Apart from the heart, an Egyptian mummy doesn't have any internal organs left inside the body.The others were removed and put into separate canopic jars that were buried with it.

12736. History Facts

British schools used to keep at least two types of standard cane for hitting naughty children. Children over 15 years of age could be hit with the senior cane, which was longer and thicker than that used on younger children.

12737. History Facts

People used to believe that smearing their clothes with fat from a dead pig would keep away fleas.

Fact
A hairbreadth away is 1/48 of an inch.      .. More >>